WinZO forays into Brazil, to invest $25 million on expansion

WinZO enables developers to host their games on the platform and earn revenue through a microtransaction-based monetisation model

Social gaming and interactive entertainment platform WinZO is expanding to Brazil, its first international market, in a bid to diversify its operations, the company said on October 5.

This move comes at a time when India's real-money gaming industry is trying to navigate through a challenging period posed by the government's new 28 percent goods and services tax (GST) regime which became effective from October 1.

Real-money gaming companies have previously claimed that the new rates would increase a company's tax burden by 350 to 400 percent, severely impacting the growth trajectory of the sector.

"We always wanted to go global... but definitely, this move has been accelerated on the backdrop of the GST related developments that have happened" WinZO co-founder Paavan Nanda told Moneycontrol.

Started by Nanda and Saumya Singh Rathore in 2018, WinZO enables developers to host their games on the platform and earn revenue through a microtransaction-based monetisation model ranging from Re 1- Rs 10, instead of the traditional in-app purchases and advertisement-based models.

Read: WinZO debuts $50 million fund to back gaming, interactive entertainment startups

WinZO claims to have a portfolio of over 100 games spanning various genres, including strategy, sports, casual, card, arcade, racing and action, and board games across 12 languages such as English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali and Bhojpuri.

This launch will open up a new market for over 100 developers on the platform, enabling them to attract a new set of audience for their games. Nanda said they will invest about $25 million across distribution and brand building initiatives in Brazil.

"WinZO will take care of distribution, marketing, brand promotions, and monetization and will generate additional revenue for developers from Brazil" he said.

WinZO will also make its app available in Portuguese in Brazil, since most of the users speak Portuguese in the country. Brazil is the fourth-largest mobile gaming market with over 90 million users, it said.

"We've seen massive returns of creating vernacular products in India, and we continue to apply those learnings for Brazil as well" Nanda said.

He also said they are committed to developing a "Made in Bharat" consumer tech product that caters to the interactive entertainment needs of young users worldwide. "We have built a tech stack that caters to over 150 million young users from Bharat today and can be scaled across the world" Nanda said.

WinZO counts US-based Griffin Gaming Partners, Maker’s Fund, Courtside, and Kalaari Capital among its investors. It has raised a total of $100 million across multiple financing rounds to date.

In June, WinZO claimed that it has crossed 40 billion micro transactions for the financial year FY23 and it expects to touch 55 billion transactions by FY24.