GreedyGame is a platform for game developers to make their in-game content dynamic. The Noida based startup was founded in 2013 by Arpit Jain and Arink Verma and is headquartered at TLABS, New Delhi. They provide an in-game advertising platform for brands. They have recently been selected for BlackBox Connect where they will spend 2 weeks in valley pitching about their startup and developing their business.
Arink and Arpit attended college together at IIT Ropar. They started working together on a couple of social-tech entrepreneurship projects at college. Since then, they are working on ideas together. Arpit went on to work for PayPal at their innovation labs for one year while Arink completed his graduation. Arink has worked with 'Google's Summer of Code' for consecutive years and is a key contributor in Python foundation. After Arink graduated, Arpit quit his job to start GreedyGame.
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Arpit Jain and Arink Verma, Founders of GreedyGame[/caption]"The favorite time pass for college students is playing games during classes. The one thing which got us to start thinking about this idea is the intrusiveness of the banner ads that come in between games on mobile. Completely frustrated by interstitial ads, we decided to find out better and non-intrusive ways of advertising in game," says Arink.
“We used to play a lot of games at college, extensively on PC/Console and gradually shifted to mobile. This idea struck us sheerly because of our interest in this domain and interest in technology. The mobile gaming space is still very dynamic, making it all the more interesting for a startup as they can challenge big players in no time,” adds Arpit.
Game developers can create themes with their dynamic in-game assets such as characters, coins, power-ups, skins, textures etc and target users with localized themes. Rather than keeping the game static, developers can leverage viral events and key festivals to enhance their user retention and increase game’s reach without updating the games on app stores. Game developer can set dynamic theme based on player's attributes to increase engagement and also generate revenue by native in-game ads.
There are 2 groups of stakeholders for using our platform, game developers and brand advertisers. They are partnering with a lot of game developers to integrate their platform into the games. Along with this, they are partnering with few brands and ad agencies who handle branding campaigns for big brands.
This team of 2 students is working interns from IIM Indore, IIT Ropar and IIIT Hyderabad who like to work in cutting edge technology to build our product. They use Python-based Django framework for back-end API’s. For front-end, they are using AngularJS. “We are working with a lot of game engines as well so that our tool can be easily integrable across all engines, and hence our sdk architecture is cross platform portable to multiple languages including C#, JS, Java, C++ to make things work,” says Arnik.
They have raised funding from Department of IT (Government of India) through IIT Ropar’s E-cell and are currently incubated at TLABS. "From both incubators, we get a lot of mentorship at crucial points in our journey," says Arpit. They plan to become the biggest platform for branding activity on mobile globally.
As a message for future entrepreneurs, they say, "It is very early for us to give advice, but from our small experience, I can say that entrepreneurs should not take a lot of time writing and thinking about hypothesis, they should actually go ahead and do it, because that is probably the easiest way to convert hypothesis into business."
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