Playbasis, a Thailand-Based Gamification Startup, is Ready To Gamify Asia

Gamification, defined by Oxford dictionary as “the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity,” is not a term known to most Thais (if you don’t know what it means, start with this video). I’d say if you bring this word up, most people (besides the IT folks) think of joysticks or arcade games. But Playbasis, a Thailand-based startup, has seen this as an opportunity and seized it. Backed by Thai VC Ardent Capital, PlayBasis offers “gamification as a service”.

Playbasis aims to make it easy for businesses to implement game-like services onto their customer-facing or back-end web platforms to incentivize workers and customers. For example, if a business has an “eat healthy” campaign going on, Playbasis’s platform could keep records of the supermarket’s customers, and if one purchases certain ingredients that are considered healthy, the person would get a special digital badge. Meanwhile, on the back-end for employees, if any employees share at least one healthy recipe with their co-workers on the intranet system that’s working with the Playbasis platform, that employee could get a special reward that displays on their internal web presence.

The platform works on both desktop and mobile apps of all sorts. Playbasis focuses on B2B for annual contracts and currently has over 572,000 users and 15-16 servers on Amazon web cloud.

In August of last year, Robert Zepeda, Playbasis’s founder and CEO, pitched the gamification concept to Paul Srivorakul, Ardent Capital’s co-founder and executive chairman, and the idea was accepted right away.

Although the idea of gamification is great, the challenge is how to make other people see the same thing. Rob explained:

The most challenging part is education. How do you explain the gamification concept to people who never heard of it? We’re not game developers. We just want to add the competing and the fun part to the business you’re already running.

Thais love to “play”

Rob mentioned his gamification idea was sparked partly by his own efforts to learn Thai as a foreigner. Instead of asking “Do you use Facebook?”, “Do you use Line?”, or “Do you use Twitter?” Thai people use the word “play”. We’d say “Do you play Facebook?”, “Do you play Line?” or “Do you play Twitter?” From this, Rob gathered that to Thai people, fun and play are a big deal in the country. The culture is that everything should be “sanook” (fun).

Rob also added:

People already love spending time on Facebook, but what do they get in real life? We want to apply that to something good such as education, fitness, or even just to make work more fun and support the internal communication system. We just want to make your life more engaging and more fun.

Playbasis’s client portfolio in Thailand is quite impressive considering it only started less than a year ago. The clients are included True (a telco company), Tops (a supermarket chain), and TMB (one of the largest Thai banks).