"Conversations make Communities in Gaming" - 2021

Back to the Past, when I was a teenage gamer, I was into RoadRash, NFS 3, Doom, Mortal Combat 4. This iconic game popularised the first-person genre to video gamers. Being the last man standing and fighting deadly enemies just scared the living daylights out of us.

P.S. Super Mario and Contra are still my favorites

The evolution of the gaming industry has been magnificent, we are no longer in the period of time when we used to play games alone and compare our scores with the previous round or with our friends. Compared to now, the games were unexciting back then.

Counter-Strike 1.6 took the gaming world by storm and set the stage for online competition. I clearly remember "Zapak Gaming Centre" in Vidyanagar, India, where my friends (Vinesh Nair, Harimohan Prajapati) and I used to jam all night over weekends behind a closed door as it was prohibited for shops to be open all night then. However, with the addition of features like real-time text and voice chat, CS 1.6 improved the gaming experience to a whole new level. We can communicate with other gamers, discuss game plans, tease our opponents, which added more fun to gaming.

Now, a game without real-time engagement is like Earth without oxygen. Gaming now is not just about games, it's about collaboration, conversation, and being part of a community, a global community. Slack groups or the use of Discord for gaming is an excellent example of collaboration and community build around gaming.

But the shortcomings of using Discord or Slack are:

• Zero control over the data.
• Promoting Discord/Slack and diluting your brand.
• Reliability is utterly dependent on them.
• Gamers leave your game to chat on other platforms.
• No profanity or moderation control which means any negative experience your gamers are having in discord is associated with you and your brand from racism, vulgar & foul languages to bullying.

IP Messaging (variously referred to as "real-time", "native", or "in-app" messaging) is the need of the hour for most games since it not only increases User engagement and Loyalty but also addresses the need for “Context” based Application to Person communication.

This being said, developers, these days tend to outsource their non-core functions to third-party service providers to focus on their core product. This is evident from the likes of Google opening their Maps API for developers to easily integrate navigation in their apps, Stripe and PayPal simplifying Payments - which made us realize that Messaging can be simplified in a similar way and thus Applozic.

Applozic Chat SDK (Software Development Kit) and APIs are developed to offer a broad communication platform that offers businesses to build anything they want around messaging.

To empower all the industries to add their own Discord/Slack-like white-label 1:1 chat or group chat and build a community around their games, engage, retain and increase collaboration within their gamers while having complete control over the data, reliability, scalability, security, and most importantly giving the gamers the experience that replicates their company values and integrity.

There are similar companies like SendBird, Stream, PubNub and all of the solutions are typically more cost-effective than building in-house. Will talk about them later.

Till then, GGWP