Good and engaging content has always been the king! Sports technology platform Rooter, which has engaged and retained audience through various sports content from quizes, debates, discussion, and so on , is now aiming to expand its platform for gaming and esports content.
In conversation with AnimationXpress Rooter founder and CEO Piyush shared, “We always wanted to get into the gaming and esports that was in our plan and also to create content around gaming and esports. In fact, we are going to launch something officially on that really soon and which will help rooter to become a platform where there is sports content as well as gaming content, esport content”
Currently Rooter is a platform for sports and fantasy sports content where they focus on voice, video, and vernacular. A lot of users, influencers, celebrities are utilising the platform to create content in the form of quizzes, games, live streams, discussion, debates, and more on sports and fantasy sports. Agarwal highlighted that even though on-ground matches have been cancelled, the platform has not been hugely affected like other platforms because first, it is a content platform for sports and fantasy sports and second even after on-ground matches are halted, there are lot of other sports content sports fans are consuming because of their enthusiasm for the sports in India. However, he also added “when there will be no live sports there is no fantasy. There is no fantasy content in our products, there are no fantasy games in any product right now. So none of the fantasy platforms are doing any games and we are also not putting any kind of content. But sports is again starting this weekend with Bundesliga, which is with football this weekend then there is Premier League which will be back early June. So as sports keep coming back fantasy sports content will also come back on our app.”
Giving the picture of the business during the COVID-19 lockdown period, he says, “revenues are lower than what it was before the lockdown I will not disagree that it’s not as bad as other platforms, we are doing reasonably good. Retention has gone up, about four to five per cent, users are picking more and they are finding the product relevant. Secondly, the time spent on the app has increased by almost three minutes, on an average, it is more than 20 minutes per user per day, that’s good and the number of session has also increased.”
Recently the company partnered with Paytm First games and Paytm has invested in their company and in return rooter will be integrated in Paytm app as well as Paytm First Games apps to provide content to their audience on the platforms.
About the partnership, Paytm First Games COO Sudhanshu Gupta said, “We continue to grow our content offerings through gaming and the addition of Rooter’s communities and user-generated content will further enhance the use cases available on our platform. In the coming months, we will add more interactive content around Fantasy sports, Esports, and games while bringing benefits of the Paytm ecosystem to Rooter.”
On asking whether the platform which they are expanding for gaming and esports will be similar to Twitch he replied “yeah exactly, it will be something like twitch but much more customised for the audience. There will not be any games on our platform, but games what users will play on their phone say for example Ludo or if they will go to Paytm first games and play games like Real Cricket, Stick Cricket, FIFA, PUBG, anything they play on mobile they will be able to share the content of these games on rooter via Livestream or game streaming videos.”
They believe that audience for sports and gaming are very similar, “it’s a chain of 16 to 30 years old audience from tier one and tier two cities who are watching sports and also playing a lot of games on the mobile right now. So we identified this opportunity that if there are sports fans on our products then there are gaming fans too so we are aiming to offer them gaming tools which will help the users to do streaming and create content on the platform. This way they will also be able to join gaming communities which will be a great product for them because it is not just giving one value but it is giving them two values under the same vertical of content. Basically, we are coming up with the features which will allow users to create and consume content in gaming and esports under one umbrella,” he explained.
Although Rooter did not disclose much about their upcoming product he has shared that “after lockdown ends sports will resume again and following which Rooter will not only offer content for sports but also gaming and esports. Actually, after lockdown, we will have 3x better products for users where they will get content for sports, esports, and gaming altogether. We can’t just wait for the lockdown to end because the product and value that we have created for our user will be tremendous.”