A recent interview with Mr Ankur Singh, Founder and CEO of Witzeal Technologies a gaming company that is disturbing the online pay-to-play gaming industry in India.

Below are the insights.

How has the journey been from being bootstrapped to being profitable? How did you overcome the initial challenges?

I come from a small town in Uttar Pradesh and since childhood, I was passionate about playing the game of catapult and stone to break bulbs. I began my career as a programmer, I had the desire to use innovation and curate a fascinating game. Scrutinizing my skills, I wound up making a game that got a huge achievement. This inspired me to do my best and form Witzeal. With a group of five, we delivered ‘Bulb Smash’ in 2017 and it will stay exceptional to me until the end of time.

Soon after the arrival of Bulb Smash, we set foot in the space of casual gaming with three new titles and one in cricket fantasy in 2018. Our games were performing well as the online pay-to-play gaming sector thrived all over the nation and the change in the Play Store’s rules for pay-to-play gaming applications in 2019 pushed us to reconsider our technique and I must confess that it was a game-changer.

With the intent of acquiring in-house developed games in pay-to-play gaming, we uncovered our multi-gaming platform ‘Big Cash’.

Having said that, with being bootstrapped and the constantly growing rivalry which is perfect for the sector, the excursion is challenging for us. Our aim from starting has been to make an organization that is self-sustainable and for us to be self-sustainable, it was relevant for us to have a productive business and we keep on being like that.

Can you state some challenges that were specific to the gaming sector?

The online gaming industry in India is the dawn sector which is growing at an outstanding rate. One of the key difficulties is that gaming is a state subject while gaming organizations are online and digital. As of now, the pay-to-play gaming Industry is self-regulated and administered by comprehensive charters and audits. While skill-based games are allowed in many States the shortfall of comprehensive regulations in the gaming sector makes the subject complex. Furthermore, most of the State Gaming Acts are antiquated and were brought into impact a lot before the period of the Internet. Additionally, various state translations of online skill games make it hard to fabricate scale for businesses. Be that as it may, we see hope with the new government declaration by regulation and extensive consultation with the stakeholders of the industry.

As and when the rules are validated, we believe that it would drive organized development of the gaming sector, and our broad experience and spotlight on innovation injected with innovation and creativity would keep on empowering us to remain at the top.

What makes Witzeal unique compared to the rest of the players in the industry?

We at Witzeal, have consistently intended to remain on top of things by continually improving our products and giving a unique gaming experience. Each of the games on our multi-gaming platform, ‘Big Cash’, is designed and created in-house. Thus, this empowers us to give a personalized gaming experience to our players while keeping an elevated degree of security. This has supported players’ partiality and has additionally increased user trust. We take pride in referencing that through our examination we have had the option to make the application such that it occupies exceptionally less space when contrasted with other applications in this segment.

We are committed to conveying novel gaming encounters and remembering that, we have as recently launched RummyKhel and CandyCash games. Other than this, we recently collaborated with SHIELD, a global risk intelligence company, to guarantee a protected and authentic platform for our users. Also, we have an RNG (Random Number Generator) certification set up that protects fair play for card-based gaming. With such developments, we stand among the Top 5 RMG operators in India.

What are Witzeal’s plans in terms of growth strategy and market expansion?

To continue to draw in new players of any age and gender to our ‘Big Cash’ platform, we are thinking of carrying out new games and elements quarterly. We are focusing on acquiring new innovations that will further develop the user experience and assist our foundation with acquiring fame.

With ‘Big Cash’, Witzeal’s flagship product, having gotten north of 35 million downloads, we intend to release a couple of additional games in the impending quarter given the user demand. We have previously delivered a few versions of Ludo in the last quarter, and received an astounding response, we intend to keep adding new features to give our users a one-of-a-kind gaming experience.

We are in conversations with a couple of investors for raising capital and at the right time we would do it to support our potential growth opportunities.

With technology advancing at such a formidable pace, how do you think will it impact the gaming sector?

Throughout the long term, India’s gaming industry has encountered noteworthy development, principally determined by technology-led innovations. To additional drive, the development of the Indian gaming industry, a continually changing innovation scene is supposed to consolidate arising innovations, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, and blockchain, among others.

The consistent integration of next-gen technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) into games is one more way that 5G technology is anticipated to support the development of the gaming industry. VR permits users to completely submerge themselves in fake settings, while AR copies fake things in reality. These advancements are set to turn out to be increasingly more typical in the online gaming sector as developers and organizations hope to exploit their colossal potential as the requirement for more profound degrees of association develops.

Furthermore, as developers work to make games that are more responsive, versatile, and demanding, artificial intelligence (AI) is likewise taking on a bigger job in the gaming industry. AI isn’t simply restricted to the production of intelligent characters but at the same time is being utilized to improve pathfinding, navigation, non-player characters, intuitive stories, and environmental conditions in games.

Credit: Track.In