Playbasis wants to help app makers engage the Minecraft generation

Gamification is one of those buzzwords that has been around forever in the tech space. It’s been called everything from a shallow trend to a great way to attract users to a product and engage them. And it’s also very likely to tune people out when they hear it, conjuring up specters like gaudy digital badges and meaningless points.

Thailand-based Playbasis thinks gamification can be so much more than that. It is CEO Robert Zepeda’s mission to completely change the way users interact with apps and services – and maybe also turn the world into a slightly better place in the process.

Playbasis began by gamifying commercial experiences for companies like telecommunications carriers. One of its largest clients is Singaporean telco Starhub, prompting Playbasis to staff up in the island nation to be able to better serve its customers.

Playbasis CEO Robert Zepeda

The startup closed its US$1.8 million series A round in June, with investors like Thailand’s InVent, a venture capital firm owned by holding company Intouch Holdings, Cherubic Ventures, and 500 Startups participating. This has allowed Playbasis to engage potential corporate customers with more confidence. It has its investors’ support and clout behind it, but it has also worked towards hiring across the board, getting people like Rudy Schalk, an old Silicon Valley warhorse whose previous stomping grounds include Flextronics and Xiaomi, and whose work has ended up in, among others, Google Maps.

See: Playbasis, a Thailand-based gamification startup, is ready to gamify Asia“We need this caliber of executive because we’re selling largely into the executive level of these corporates,” Rob says. “Lots of times we have conversations with business unit leaders and executives closer to the CEO, helping them understand how digital and gamification go hand in hand and how it can really transform their business.”

A new language

Rob, a veteran in game design and a former competitive gamer himself, feels that gamification can redefine user experience. “Gamification is fundamentally about driving behavior, motivating people,” he says. A startup can make the coolest product, but how can it bring people aboard, make them use it, and keep them around? “We think gamification will be part of the design process, of the human interaction process. It will be there but we won’t notice it, because it will just be a better way of doing things,” he explains.

When Rob talks about gamification, he is thinking about the entire process through which a user interacts with a system – from the user interface to the feedback the user gets from using it. Games have been around for so long and have soaked through our culture so effectively that it has evolved into its own language. It’s a language that millions of people around the world have gotten very fluent in.

“[Millennials] in most major countries have become the biggest segment of the population, they are entering the workforce, becoming big consumers,” Rob says. A big corporation might look very boring trying to get and retain young people, so it needs to change its approach. Part of it, Rob thinks, might involve blending work with play and making it a little more fun and engaging, using cooler, more modern tools that this generation is already used to in their everyday lives.

“Even the Minecraft generation is growing up now,” Rob says. “There are babies born with iPads, starting out with games. They’re going to be super influenced by gaming interfaces, and they’re going to understand them natively.”

A force for good

Playbasis figures corporations will want to engage these up-and-coming audiences, and that’s why it wants to be there at the front lines, offering not only ways to make their clients’ apps more engaging, but even to build those apps for them from the ground up. So the startup now provides sets of tools to create apps, offering push notifications, social media integration, offline storage, and more. It has a freemium model which allows developers anywhere to use one of 50 available APIs for their creations. Rob defines the startup’s offering in terms of making products and building user bases as “the five M’s”; Make, Motivate, Manage, Monetize, and Multiply. For that last one, Playbasis is preparing to launch a new product called GrowKit to accelerate user acquisition.

To achieve its goals, Playbasis sees B2B as the best way to grow, by developing apps for its larger, corporate clients. It hopes its suite of services, as well as its expertise on user engagement and retention can make its offering valuable enough for them – and that hope seems to be paying off. Rob claims the company is forecasting US$2 to 3 million in revenue by the end of 2016, a 10-fold jump up from last year and the year before.

Eventually, Rob hopes Playbasis will drive innovation in the gamification space to make it a force for good. “Could we learn new skills that help us in our lives, could we contribute productively to society [while playing games]?” he asks. He cites startups such as Duolingo as examples of compelling, engaging experiences that have a positive impact on users’ lives. Other examples include crowdsourcing information, much like Foursquare mapping the world through users’ contributions, for causes such as disaster relief or traffic congestion.

“We want to reshape misperceptions on what gamification is or isn’t, we want to write the book. It’s still so new that we can define it as we go,” Rob says.

As Playbasis pitched in our Arena competition at Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015, the judges wanted to know more about the way the company monetizes, and more importantly, how unique their gamification offerings are. After all, if a lot of companies end up using the same templates, users will start seeing the same gamified experiences again and again. Rob clarified that Playbasis is currently very involved in creating custom experiences.

“We’re trying to solve a business problem with a game,” he says. “Different mechanics are used to drive different outcomes.” Ultimately, however, Rob thinks Playbasis is creating a platform, much like Unity or WordPress, for creators to try different kinds of ideas and come up with their own unique mechanics.

This is part of the ongoing coverage of Tech in Asia Tokyo 2015, our annual conference taking place on September 8 and 9.