Nazara Technologies today, announced its partnership with CrimzonCode, a development studio to enter into Real Money Quiz vertical. CrimzonCode owns TopQuiz franchise, which is one of India’s leading quiz games that allows players to win real money. Nazara also picked up a minority stake of 27.42 per cent in the company which runs CrimzonCode.
Nazara will be publishing TopQuiz across emerging markets as part of a multi-year partnership with CrimzonCode. TopQuiz enables users to play interesting quizzes around localized topics and stand a chance to win real money.
In a short span of six months, TopQuiz has scaled this to over 5,00,000 users and currently has over 1,00,000 monthly active users engaging for over 15 minutes on the application per session. Most of the users are from tier two and tier three cities and the company intends to scale this to a larger number of users within India and other emerging markets.
CrimzonCode founder Devavrat Jatia, says “Quizzing combined with real money has immense potential. Skill-based gameplay around quiz is deeply embedded in the DNA of Indians and now have a chance to put your knowledge to earn money is a huge opportunity for millions of Indians. We believe that having the backing of Nazara as an investor and publisher will provide us with a springboard to launch real money quiz in 61 countries across the emerging markets where Nazara had its presence, as on 30 September 2017.”
Apart from Mastermind Sports and HalaPlay, Nazara has also invested in Moong Labs. Nazara acquired Nextwave Multimedia of World Cricket Championship (WCC) fame and NODWIN Gaming, which are in line with building a network of synergistic companies for operations in India and other emerging markets across the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia.
According to Nazara Technologies CEO Manish Agarwal, “Quizzing has been very popular with Indians and is a source of clean fun and a booster for self- pride, cutting across age groups; gender and socio-economic class. We believe that the team at CrimzonCode has got the endorsement from their users in form of high level of engagement and that this opportunity to earn real money combined with the fun of quizzing, is expected to set the Indian market abuzz.”
Nazara Technologies Limited has filed a Draft Red Herring Prospectus and IIFL Special Opportunities Fund and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala are shareholders of Nazara. With ESL’s investment in Nazara and NODWIN’s securing exclusive rights of using the ESL system and platform for five years, Nazara believes it is poised to exploit the opportunities in the esports business.
