Rucept, an in-app merchandising platform for video games, has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding led by Arka Venture Labs with participation from Silicon Valley investors. The company will use the fund to expand its team, operations and infrastructure.
Rucept enables game creators to display custom merchandise and blockchain-based digital merchandise inside apps or websites. It increases engagement, retention, and profitability for studios and creators. The company said it works with US-based studios Electronic Arts and Disney and has a growing list of clients across the globe.
Merchandising for movies is a $60 billion market and most of it is for a small percentage of cinema. Gaming, on the other hand, is a bigger industry and most of the titles have game assets that studios want to license to make collectibles and other merchandise. With metaverse making virtual worlds mainstream, this is set to be a $150 billion market. Already the market for licensed merchandise is $360 billion.
"The Internet has made it easy for creators to publish and distribute content, however, this sort of democratization has still not fully materialized for physical products," said Mudit Khurana, chief executive officer of Rucept, which he founded in 2019. Khurana has expertise in the fashion and lifestyle eCommerce space. He has built verticals while previously working at Paytm and Snapdeal.
"Gaming is rapidly becoming the most engaged form of entertainment and merchandising is at the core of this experience. Gaming studios are finding it hard to offer a customized merchandising experience at scale," said Aditya Nishtala, who works with Arka Venture Labs.
Attract, a game development company has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Kalaari Capital for strengthening products, expanding its team, and preparing for the metaverse, a virtual-reality space where users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users.
Mobile gaming is a $2.2 billion market in India, poised to reach $7 billion by 2025 growing at an astounding CAGR of 40%. An average Indian consumes over 8.5 hours of gaming content per week.
“While RMG and Casual Games have continued to do well, we are excited by the immense potential of the upcoming models in Gaming (sic). Mythological games like God Of War and Assassin’s Creed have worked out very well across the world, selling over 200 million copies and we think the Indian Mythology (sic) is still an untapped opportunity since the rich history of India offers a high possibility of a hit global IP being built out of here,” said Vamshi Reddy, partner at Kalaari Capital.
Atirath develops games in casual and strategy genres. It was founded in mid last year by Shiva Bayyapunedi & Ramachandra Raju who worked together at Apalya Technologies. Their vision is to create a game metaverse with geographic, economic, and social experience in the strategy genre connecting players, content creators, and game publishers.
“We are at an exciting stage in the gaming world where new business models are evolving from the game as a service to the game as a platform model. As the model evolves, we see a lot of innovation happening in a centralized and decentralized metaverse world. We are building game metaverse in strategy genre with Indian mythology theme with unique gameplay features,” said Shiva Bayyapunedi, co-founder at Atirath,.
Atirath Gaming Technologies has a team size of 15 members based out of Hyderabad developing casual/strategy genre-based gaming metaverse platform.
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