Gamestacy, funded by Sanjay Kumar and founded by Danish Sinha, and backed with investment by Sanjay Kumar (ex CEO of Atran India and Elior India), in association with Beamable, is launching Influenzer, a unique social, multiplayer mobile game that lets players live their ultimate social media fantasy.
Gamestacy is a mobile game studio that combines business expertise with extensive gaming knowledge to develop original mobile game IP. Gamestacy is currently testing six game titles for the mobile market – Influencer, Turny Road, Nuclear Reaction, Fashion Frenzy, Master Cook, and Age of Democracy.
Their debut title Influenzer is currently in soft launch and is poised to usher in a new option for gender inclusive games in the rapidly growing mobile games market. Gamestacy will accomplish this by training and empowering women gamers to become industry leaders and creating a more welcoming environment through their game titles and online social communities.
According to a joint report by Google and games market intelligence firm Niko Partners, India has the lowest overall percentage of women gamers in Asia, at 18 per cent, however, with women constituting 42 per cent of India’s overall smartphone base or about 210 million users, there is huge opportunity to broaden India’s gaming audience. Hiring in the gaming industry has gone up by 25-30 per cent in the past six months with 20 per cent of new hires being women in entry-level and senior leadership roles, according to staffing firm Team Lease.
When asked about his vision for the company, Gamestacy founder Danish Sinha said, “Women character representation in video games is lacking with only 5per cent of video games showcasing women protagonists. Various studies reveal that gender stereotypes continue to prevail in video games, with women characters usually objectified and hyper-sexualized. And when not depicted in this manner, they are often portrayed as a love interest, innocent, or needing to be rescued by a male character. I combined my passion for gaming with a desire to build more inclusive games for a largely untapped market. The investment by Sanjay Kumar and the partnership with Beamable will allow us to rapidly serve this vision by rapidly bringing a half dozen new games into the market. ”
The partnership with American company Beamable is critical to Gamestacy’s strategy of rapidly building and launching over a half-dozen gender inclusive games. Earlier this year, Beamable raised $5M in a per-series A round to build and deploy their live game services platform and make it really easy for game studios to add social, commerce, multiplayer, content management, and liveops tools to any game product. The same technology that powers Gamestacy has delivered powerful game features for hit mobile titles like Star Trek Timelines, and Game of Thrones Ascent.
When asked about the partnership, Beamable CTO Ali El Rhermoul said, “When we launched Beamable, Gamestacy was among our first customers! It’s been our distinct pleasure and privilege to help Danish and team launch a new generation of inclusive games on our platform. Our early adopters paved the way for hundreds of new developers who have since joined the Beamable community.”
