Playing games on our mobile phones is adored by most people. Probably for many of us, it is our favourite pastime activity. So, here we have a perfect gaming startup based in tier 2 city, Noida, the BlackLight Gaming.
How Was It Initiated
BlackLight Gaming was founded in 2012 by Shruti Sarraf. At that time, mobile games weren’t prominent, neither as a source of business nor as a medium of entertainment. Shruti started coding when she was eight years old and started developing HTML5 games for Symbian browsers and BlackLight was developing from an outhouse in South Delhi.
However, in 2014 she realized that hiring people in such an unprofessional setup is demanding. Hence, she moved to Noida and built office space for BlackLight games. In an interview with Your Story, she said, “The ecosystem was still getting built in those days. Simple things like tracking user analytics, game performance, monetization opportunities, hiring talent, etc. that are easy today, were not that straightforward back then.”
When BlackLight started, it rolled out word-based games targeted towards English speaking communities such as the USA, UK, England etc. since those countries had larger playing audiences. The games that were rolled out were Word Search, Word Alchemy, Wordathon and many more.
They started gaining recognition, gradually. However, their first breakthrough was when they released the first card game known as Solitaire, released in 2015. The game started getting noticed not only in India but in the USA and Europe as well. Seeing the massive success, they rolled out various versions for the game such as Solitaire Zen and Spider Solitaire.
Changing Fate Of Games In India
With smartphones coming in, the craze of playing mobile games boomed. In downloading games, India stood in the 5th and 2nd position globally in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Mobile gaming started to take off and this worked out magically for BlackLight games.
In 2017, when Anupam Srivastava joined as a co-founder, they started evolving their strategies. They paid heed to the Indian audience and developed games that they were more inclined towards. Anupam had many feathers to his cap as he had built popular games like Hangman and Teen Patti before joining BlackLight games.
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Talking to Your Story, Shruti stated, “To meet the growing appetite for mobile games, we have built a strong infrastructure, which provides reliable real-time multiplayer game experience to our players and helps us in tracking meaningful game analytics. One of the common challenges in ad-monetized multiplayer games is the cost of game servers. Our game servers are authoritative, cost-optimized, and scalable. And they are built as plug-and-play solutions that can be utilized in all our titles.”
Success Of The BlackLight
Revenues for BlackLight Gaming started accelerating with the coming of the pandemic. As people were boredom stricken, they turned towards gaming to entertain themselves.
BlackLight Gaming saw a 10X increase in their revenues and, the majority of it derived from Ludo SuperStar, which was the second most played Ludo game after Ludo King in the world.
As of now, BlackLight Gaming has more than 3 million users daily and 70% of them are based in India. Shruti says that it was an amalgamation of the right content, right time and right market that profited towards their growth.
Image Source: Google
Sources: Financial Express, BlackLight Gaming, Asian News
Connect with the blogger: Palak Dogra
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