Building mobile based esports streaming for the world out of India

“My brother has a PS, and I saw him gaming; those are my first memories. In college, a ton of my friends were into PC gaming. Sitting in our CS labs, they played LOL, Dota, and CS:GO,” Pooja said. “We had a classmate called Dota because that’s how much he liked the game! My co-founder Aditya was one of those people. Honestly, I thought gaming was for “nerds.” The stereotypical depiction in western TV series of gamers was the one I believed - kids building their own PCs and playing games. Remember Sheldon & others from Big Bang Theory?"

“I started noticing that everyone was playing games, specifically mobile games. My siblings, who are doctors and have never used a PC, started playing PubG & COD Mobile. My younger cousins were playing FreeFire. I saw it cross the economic and age divides. My parents were playing ludo with their friends. Swiggy delivery boys and make-up artists were playing. This one instance always stuck with me - I was in a cab, and the driver told his girlfriend - “Tu aur PUBG life ho meri.” Stunned, I was!” 

“Top games are earning more than the movie blockbusters. Grand Theft Auto V game has raked in more than $6 billion. Compare that to Avatar, the highest-grossing movie, at $2.8 billion.”

“People love their digital identities in games — skins, points, achievements. I started playing games as a part of my research and got hooked. My cup of tea is not AAA games but games like SimCity. I was spending 20-30k per month on Sim City at one point! It feels as real to me as the physical world - the club I am a part of, my team, my city, etc.,” she told me. “You can be yourself and have fun with people across the globe. Who wants to be in the real world, right? It’s not as fun. Within games, you can be something more; you can be someone cooler.” 

“Most GenX parents, including my and my friend’s parents, have borne the notion that gaming is detrimental to children. In those years, education gained cultural importance in India. Engineering and medicine were promoted. Career and income were directly proportional to your degree. Arts and sports could be hobbies since schools promoted them as a part of the curriculum. You stopped after 12th because of the lack of understanding of opportunity in a non-conventional field and the concentration of success to the top 0.1%.”

“Parents are letting their kids pursue sports, law, commerce, design, and journalism. It is becoming more acceptable. People are starting up and becoming YouTubers. Gaming is the same - money has started coming in via youtube channels or esports tournaments. Parents will be more supportive of kids’ gaming as this keeps going mainstream.”

“There are 2.8B+ active gamers worldwide. Just let that number sink in. FB has 2.9B active users, Youtube has 2.8-2.9B, and Instagram has over 2B. Gaming is as mainstream as social media and content. The number of hours put in is comparable to the biggest social apps in the world.”

“With powerful smartphones and high internet penetration, PC/console quality games are possible on phones, with multiplayer and cross-platform features.”

“People used to think that the only way to monetise mobile games would be through ads. That is proving to be wrong. Developers have the incentive to build for mobile now.” 

“GenZ is very comfortable online. Gaming just takes that to the next level. It gives you a way to connect without having to look for subjects.

Mobile games are increasingly becoming multiplayer. No longer does a gamer need to coordinate with 4-5 friends to play a game. I can play a game without pinging anyone. I will just find three random people from my country.” 

“There are pure streaming apps like Omlet Arcade or Streamlabs, but streaming is one small part of what we do. Discord does a great job serving PC and Xbox gamers. What about mobile gamers, though? Where are they finding their communities? We want to build something for mobile-first gamers, ground up. Our market is not underserved; it’s not served at all.”

“We spent almost a year researching this - speaking to streamers, YouTubers, gamers, esports organizations, and game developers across India, the US, Sweden, Indonesia, Brazil, and the UK.”

“We work with a lot of videos, audio, and real-time chats. So we knew from day one that we needed to build it right and patiently.

We built our Android app first.

Since the quality and stability of the audio and video were in a no-compromise bucket for every streamer, our MVP was optmized for 1080p video quality with support for mic + in-game audio.“

“Our early users were very small YouTubers who had already live-streamed since they were more accessible and willing to experiment with a new tool. We reached out directly via YouTube chats and Instagram DMs. Our alpha was just 50 of these folks. I remember we used to talk to each one individually and watch every stream they did via Turnip to look for feedback and any possible issue. Post that, it was mostly through their friends & network. Our public launch was only possible through iteration from these early adopters. They helped prioratise upcoming features.”

“Don’t build everything; work hard to cut down features.

Launch fast and test the product in the real market.

Start with a small closed alpha, take feedback, track key metrics, and see the usage in detail.

Once you are confident about the product and tech, start scaling.”

“There are 2B+ mobile gaming users in the world. A college boy in a town in the Philippines, playing PubG on his mobile, can start his live-streaming channel on YouTube with a smartphone and an internet connection. You don’t need expensive hardware or have to learn complicated software to start streaming. For every mobile gamer, the cost, convenience, and ease make mobile streaming the go-to choice! I have seen multiple big YouTubers who still stream with their mobile.”

“The gamer has a single small screen to play the game, talk to their teammates, customise the appearance of their stream, read the chat messages of viewers and engage with them.

Now, desktop streaming offers more features, customizations, and integrations than any existing mobile tool. But none of them are built for mobile.

We constantly get requests from our users with snippets of desktop features, requesting for them. But they do understand the constraints in building them.”

“Live-streaming is an extremely interactive format. Besides producing entertaining content in the form of videos, every creator wants to cultivate deep and persistent relationships with their fans. This richness of interaction is impossible to achieve on Twitch or YouTube alone.

Clubs are where creators bring in their top fans / ardent viewers and provide a means to transform passive viewers into an actively engaged community.

Watch parties allow people to watch entertaining YouTube videos together.

All our features come together to provide the creators with the necessary tools to run diverse experiences for their communities. And their audiences love it!”

“We expected AAA intense titles like Pubg, FreeFire, Mobile legends, etc. to be the only ones to be streamed and talked around. 65-70% of all usage is around those games. But we started seeing chiller games - Ludo, Sim City, Chess, Subway Surfer, etc.

We’ve seen users try out interesting streaming formats — co-streaming and streaming marathons (12-13 hr long streams) with active audience involvement.

IRL streaming has also been quite popular.

People come to audio rooms and chat because of gaming. Then they talk about how their school went, watch a movie, study, wish each other happy birthdays, etc. Which makes sense retrospectively. Our users are gamers, but that doesn't mean that’s all they do.” 

“Every platform ended up doing that — start with gaming, then expand to other categories. We also might end up that way. But the focus for the first 3-4 years is gaming. We have around 5% non-gaming usage - ex-teachers running coaching classes on Turnip clubs, students running study groups on Turnip clubs, singers running music clubs on Turnip.”

“We started with India because we wanted the home base advantage for refining our product and testing scale. International growth has mostly been organic. When we spoke to many of our international users, we realised that most of them learned about Turnip through their friends.”

“We didn’t see many differences in usage in India vs. other countries. People need the app translated, but that’s pretty much it. We expected homogenous usage. Instagram or Snapchat don’t change their app for geos. Only the content & language change.

The kind of content people stream or talk about in clubs differs. In India, gamers would talk about Free Fire and Pubg. In SEA, people would also talk about Mobile Legends: Bang Bang. The US is heavier on COD Mobile, PubG, Minecraft, and Chess.”

“Once social apps are cracked, they scale super fast. But, initially, they are extremely unpredictable. This learning comes hard. The basics of the product, tech, and design stand. You are trying to be creative and develop a new format that will work for a billion people and keep them engaged/entertained. This is why, at least in social - everyone has a fair shot. A lot of new small teams end up creating blockbuster products. More than worrying about bigger players, you should care about creating a unique product.” 

“Don’t have presumptions. You have no idea if a feature will work until you launch it. Keep all biases aside.

Try a lot of experiments, fast. Try out wacky wild experiments. Be brave here.

Always be close to your users, who tend to be younger in social products.

Have a reproducible testing process and measure everything well.

Engagement & retention are the most important metrics. Monetization will come because of these.” 

“Supporting a disconnection-free and stable stream requires a high-quality adaptive bitrate algorithm and quick reconnection of workflows in geographies with poor internet connection.

We had to solve for low latencies and high performance on lower-end devices and in different network conditions to support streamer-viewer interactions.

Video live streaming needs a cost-intensive backend infrastructure. We must optimise for cost while supporting features at a high scale.

We have to work with the inherent limitations of mobile OS and smaller screens to provide desktop-level feature parity and streaming experience.”

“We use Agora for real-time audio. Our systems have to handle a lot of concurrencies -- people joining, leaving, raising hands, and reacting with emojis.

After tinkering with Firebase for speed to market, we had to develop an in-house chat infrastructure based on MQTT - a leading messaging protocol that handles a large number of messages with less latency.”

“We had to build our infrastructure to enable anyone from anywhere in the world to connect to our servers via their nearest edge node & which is served via sharded databases residing close to them. We have to have mechanisms for syncing these databases with each other & ensure sufficient redundancy.”

“We want to be a place for gamers to find communities they belong to, find like-minded people, and talk to each other. We want communities to set their own cultures and policies while not being completely offensive or illegal.” 

“All audio, chats, and images will go through a content moderation pipeline. If they break the platform-level rules, action will be taken. Great third-party tools like Hive give you standard content moderation out of the box.” 

“People who run a club should have enough tools to moderate. That involves blocking or banning people, enabling automated blocking of NSFW content or selected keywords, red cards as a warning for breaking the rules, reward points for following community rules, and limiting new user actions”.