One app, low data, hundreds of games. Meet the founder who wants India to play

I got my first smartphone – a trusty iPhone 3 – when I was 17 and immediately took it upon myself to get acquainted with the beautiful world of free apps. In a downloading spree that could only be described as having no direction whatsoever, Flying Hamster was one of my chosen.

The game was weird, to say the least. You were a flying hamster (obviously) and had to fly through some pretty tripped-out worlds, including one where, if you weren’t careful, a cow would get up on its hind legs and shoot milk bullets at you with its udder.

Anyway, you were only allowed eight gloriously weird minutes of play before you were prompted to buy the full version of the app on the Apple Store. Alas, I didn’t have my own credit card back then, and to this day, I don’t know what strangeness lies beyond that cow.

Now, picture hundreds of less-weird demo games like that in one place for your consumption, and you get Gamezop, a mobile-based social network for casual games that sources them right to your smartphone.

Founded by brothers Yashash and Gaurav Agarwal, the app makes several games – demo and full-length – available to users with only one download needed. Once the app is downloaded, the user does not need the internet to play the games, which is helpful in India’s slow internet infrastructure. The app is currently available on the Google Play Store and has around 1,500 users.

Yashash is a former game developer and admits that the app also serves to better pay developers and to give HTML5 games, a type of game that is designed to work for both desktop and mobile, some love.

As a developer, Yashash worked on game content, but he found himself mulling over a bigger problem he saw. “As [we developers] went on, I realized that content around the world in HTML5 was not utilized,” he tells Tech in Asia. He saw an opportunity for developers to get paid and published better.

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Not your mother’s Candy Crush

Gamezop first caught our attention in May when GSF’s mobile accelerator program in India chose it as one of its eight Indian startups to learn about mobile markets around the world. Gamezop toured India, Silicon Valley, Germany, and Singapore. Then, they placed runner-up in the Birla Institute of Technology & Science’s (BITS) Conquest 2015, a pitch contest for startups run by the college’s students. The startup will also represent India at the International Business Model Competition, sponsored by Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business on Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, campus in April.

Work and play

HTML5 games may be Yashash’s chosen development area because of their cross-compatibility, but he admits that the area needs a lot of work.