In a world where everyone has powerful phones and 5G, “everyone will play”, says Anirudh Pandita, founder of live game streaming platform Loco, confident that gaming is the “future of sports and more”.
“Everyone can participate now – you don’t have to be physically blessed or be based in a particular city or town; it is the true democratisation of sport,” Pandita told PTI in an interview. Online games, he said, have become social spaces and live streaming platforms a way for people to share that experience with others. “People will spend more time in the metaverse than ever before, with virtual communities deepening.” Loco, he added, has the best in class infrastructure when it comes to live streaming and offers streamers features to broadcast themselves with ease.
It has also built an effective moderation feature suite that empowers streamers to keep their streams clean and build a positive experience for audiences. Loco is working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) towards building the gaming and esports ecosystem. Up next, enhancing interactivity inside the platform especially on chat, rolling out features and adding new monetisation methods for streamers, Pandita said.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q: Could you briefly outline the journey of Loco so far?
A: Having been at the forefront of the consumer internet journey with our first startup Pocket Aces, which is one of India’s largest and successful digital content companies, we were quite early in noticing the transformation in the Indian consumer’s entertainment preferences. We started our journey as a live streaming platform in 2020, nurturing the small but growing community of India gamers at the time. We provided the community with tools and services that they could use to grow quickly.
Today, we are India’s leading game streaming platform. We have a 65 per cent daily active users (DAU) by market share, 9X DAU growth and a 4X year on year creator/streamer sign up growth. During this time, we have seen some iconic pop culture moments of Indian gaming happen on Loco. These include The Battleground India Master Series 2022 (BGMS), which was the most watched esports tournament in Indian history, for which the platform saw over 100 million views. In addition, we saw multiple streams break the 100,000 plus concurrency mark, a critical milestone for the individual streamer and also for the gaming community.
Q: What is the size and scale of the digital infrastructure and back-end technology supporting the Loco gaming platform?
A: Loco has the best in-class infrastructure when it comes to live streaming. From one-click streaming for beginner streamers to a full-fledged studio and analytics product for advanced streamers, we offer streamers the features to broadcast themselves with ease. We have also built a highly effective moderation feature suite that empowers streamers to keep their streams clean and build a more positive experience for their audience. We utilise machine learning to ensure that chats remain clean and any sort of bad language etc is weeded out of the chat. Our backend systems ensure that streams can scale effortlessly for streamers. The viewing experience is available on Android, iOS, and web. We will also be increasing our distribution to other screen sizes in 2023.
Q: What trends are you seeing in the market and how are they shaping your digital strategy?
A: 5G will be beneficial for gaming and live streaming as it will provide mobile devices with faster speeds, ultra-low latency, better reliability, and optimised battery usage. All of these will elevate user experience in gaming as well as live streaming. In the world of weak phones and 4G – everyone watched. In a world where everyone has powerful phones and 5G – everyone will play and the percentage of creators will increase as interactivity becomes more sought-after than passive consumption. Games have become social spaces and live streaming platforms a way for people to share that experience with others. People will spend more time in the metaverse than ever before with virtual communities deepening. This is already happening with titles like Fortnite, BGMI, Roblox, Minecraft, GTA which are not just games but social worlds.
Games will be built with game streaming in mind because that is a critical part of the marketing, community building and pop culture generation around any game. Gaming is the future of sport and more. Everyone can participate now – you don’t have to be physically blessed or be based in a particular city or town; it is the true democratisation of sport. Cost of entry for consumers to participate in esports and gaming will continue to decline as the appropriate tech infrastructure will become widely available. Earning fame now requires skill (gaming and content creation skill), not access.
Q: What’s next in your digitisation journey?
A: Over the next couple of years, you will see us enhancing interactivity inside our platform especially on chat, rolling out features that don’t exist on other platforms. Other plans include providing new and improved ways for new streamers to grow quickly. We already have the discover tab that highlights and we have streamer training programmes that help streamers to upskill themselves. We will be adding new features and initiatives here that further help streamers. We will also be adding new monetisation methods for streamers, and utilising machine learning and artificial intelligence to help with our infrastructure scaling, moderation, as well as recommendation systems; and provide new and innovative ways for publishers to market to and engage with their user base.
Q: How has cloud technology and AWS enabled you to do better?
A: Loco has had a long and productive relationship with AWS. From our very inception, AWS provided us with the ability to launch and experiment at a reasonable cost till today where we utilise multiple services within the AWS infrastructure, they have been great partners in our growth as a platform. Content streaming is a resource intensive use case for us which technically has various stages including ingestion, processing, storing, streaming of media content. We leverage services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront to store and distribute high quality live streaming video content.
We use key services such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) (for hosting our application clusters) and database services such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB for data workloads. We leverage Amazon GameLift, a dedicated game server hosting solution. By using these services, we were able to scale-out our workloads efficiently to up to 300 per cent during peak traffic and scale-in during regular time. We also leverage services such as AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to improve our security posture.
We closely engage with solutional architects and technical account managers to innovate on key strategic areas like utilising machine learning to improve our offering, optimising costs to ensure efficiency on the cost side. Based on recommendations from the AWS team, we were able to save on compute cost by using Graviton based instances and Spot instances. We are working with AWS in building a gaming and esports ecosystem. We collaborate on upskilling the industry through co-authored blogs and participation in knowledge events, which brings out aspects of the technology and business side of gaming.
