Hike’s mobile-only gaming platform, The Rush Gaming Universe (RGU), has hit $100 million in annualised gross revenue in 15 months since going live, according to a report by Business Insider.
According to Hike’s founder, Kavin Bharti Mittal, the game is likely to double its gross revenue before the end of the year. Hike was founded in 2012 as an instant messaging application and was considered one of the fastest Indian unicorns giving stiff competition to Facebook-owned WhatsApp. Hike discontinued its flagship instant messaging product in 2021 to focus on gaming and NFT products.
The bite-sized gaming application currently has 10 games. According to Mittal, another four will be added in the next quarter. RGU also plans to introduce tournaments and a leaderboard feature in the coming months as well.
“A large part of it is double down on the NFTs we launched a couple of weeks ago. And, increasing their spread across the application,” Kavin Bharti Mittal told Business Insider in an exclusive interview.
RGU launched its whitepaper last month, in which the platform highlights its underlying aim to create new economic opportunities for its community. “We’re very excited about that. It’s a new way of operating in web2. In web3, you’re completely transparent and out there,” Mittal told Business Insider.
1/ GM! ☀️
Today I’m super psyched to unveil the whitepaper for @RushGamingU – https://t.co/CbskviYZhM
For a slick summary – https://t.co/LBKwVNl1g3 (Highly Recommended)
— Kavin (kbm.eth) (@kavinbm) May 17, 2022
The roadmap for the coming year includes the launch of a ‘Special Access NFT’, a token, and the creation of an NFT marketplace. “Our goal is to embed the NFTs deeper into the gameplay to show people within the application that this is a real asset. That you can play with it and also unlock new economic opportunities,” explained Mittal.
Despite the recent economic downturn, Mittal remains optimistic that RGU will be able to weather the storm. According to him, unlike crypto exchanges – like Coinbase and Gemini who have been laying off employees – gaming within the scope of play to earn (P2E) will actually end up posing an opportunity, akin to what happened with Axie Infinity during the pandemic. “Gaming becomes a way for people to unlock economic opportunity,” he said.
In August and November last year, Hike raised funds from marquee investors, including Rajeev Misra (CEO, SoftBank Vision Fund), Sean Rad (Co-founder, Tinder), Kunal Bahl (Co-founder and CEO, Snapdeal), Arjun Sethi (Co-founder and Partner, Tribe Capital), Bhavin Turakhia (Co-founder, Zeta and Titan), Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED), Binny Bansal (Co-founder, Flipkart), Aditya Agarwal (Partner in Residence, South Park Commons), and Rohit Kumar Bansal (Co-founder, Snapdeal), also participated in the round. The company was valued at $1.4 billion during its fundraising in 2016 of despite its inability to generate any revenue from operations.