Tiki CEO Ian Goh talks about Tiki's collaboration with The Game Awards as the Global Distribution Partner

The Game Awards are almost upon us. As we eagerly wait to see who takes the ultimate gaming prize home, we talked to Ian Goh, CEO of Tiki, a short creator platform. Tiki is the official Global Distribution Partner for The Game Awards 2022, another positive step towards the ever-improving gaming scene in India. Ian Goh talked about the collaboration with The Game Awards, the unique features Tiki has in store for its gaming community, (and) how the platform looks to support the gaming sector and encourage gaming creators to join the short-video platform.

Here’s India Today Gaming’s exclusive interview with Ian Goh. 

What inspired your company to collaborate with The Game Awards?

Since our inception, Tiki aims to be a platform where people come for content and stay for (the) community. Video games is [sic] a unique domain where both high-quality content and sticky communities come together and thrive. Tiki, being a short video community share the same beliefs - high-quality content and sticky communities. Therefore, The Game Awards (TGA) is a [sic] ideal brand to collaborate with. With TGA, we're able to bring world-class entertainment content and community to our Tiki community. 

What can users of your platform expect as part of this partnership?

We launched a full set of features on Tiki for our creators to enjoy TGA together. In addition to the global live stream, users can also watch TGA's highlights on a dedicated in-app page and, we have launched a TGA branded filter in a hashtag challenge #RealVSGame for the creators to create their short videos using the hashtag. 

Gamers can also form their own multi-guest video rooms to discuss their favourite games on Tiki or hold offline meetups to share and celebrate their passion together. Therefore (the) partnership with TGA is not just a content creation opportunity for the creators but an opportunity to create a community to experience it holistically.

Having one of India's short video platforms as a global distributive partner is certainly a positive step to promote gaming in India. Will we have more gaming-related collaborators in the future on Tiki?

We definitely want to explore more. The amplified cultural impact of gaming, combined with the promise of the metaverse, has generated a plethora of opportunities for the creators. India recorded about 390 million online gamers in the year 2021. This was an eight percent growth from the previous year and is likely to reach over 450 million by 2023. Short video could be a perfect medium to promote, create and share game-related entertainment. If also equipped with strong live and community functions like that on Tiki, short video platforms can be a powerhouse for the gaming industry. 

How big is the Esports community on Tiki? Esports professionals are already highly active on other social media platforms like YouTube and Twitch. What extra does Tiki have to offer? Why should gamers choose Tiki over other platforms like these?

Esports is still a growing industry in India and is usually adopted first in tier 1 cities. Tiki will help expand the horizon for Esports across India, as it caters to the vast audience of tier 2 and tier 3 cities. YouTube and Twitch are already great for Esports. We don't want to simply follow their steps. Short video platforms should provide new and different values to the gamer community. And that's what Tiki plans to do. There're tons of professional creators on YouTube and Twitch. However, Tiki wants to be the one for grassroots gamers. They may not necessarily be hardcore gamers, but they'll surely be the majority of (the) Indian gamer community who're not just consumers but creators. 

The increasing penetration of mobile devices and 5G are making India one of the world's biggest markets for games. And with such a population native to mobile, the Indian gamer community will be very different from the western countries. Majority of the gamers consume games and game content mainly on mobile. That's where Tiki can fit in and provide something different from YouTube and Twitch used mainly by hardcore gamers in the desktop environment.

 

 

In the scenario where more than 98% of the Indian gaming community are mobile gamers, and The Game Awards 2022 has only one category dedicated exclusively for mobile gaming, why do you think live streaming the show to this audience will be a success?

Tiki always wants to be a pioneer in the market. And TGA's expanding to the mobile domain. In terms of revenue, mobile games have taken over 50% of the total revenue in the global game market. It's been well acknowledged that mobile is the future. As Wyatt Cheng said “So do you guys not have phones?”, it rightly states the future of phones, gaming and creator community

Earlier you had said that Tiki plans to reach 60 million users by the end of this year. Your total community strength currently stands at 30 million. How do you plan to bridge this gap in this one month? What are the causes behind your unfulfilled target?

We actually have reached a community of 94 million users. 32 million are monthly active users that open our app on a daily basis.
From a marketing perspective, the highly active users are way more important than the total number of users.

We've built a healthy ecosystem and sustainable growth. Instead of bridging the gap of numbers, we care more about bridging the gap of users' expectation for content and community. That explains many things we've been working on, like the GrowWithTiki program, Tiki Meetups, the TGA collaboration and more. 

How else is Tiki as a platform and an organisation working to promote gaming in India? How does Tiki support the gaming content creators on its platform?

We want to diversify and expand the concept of gaming and make it more affordable and inclusive to Indian users who may not buy an expensive console at home. Gaming is not a privilege only for the [sic] hardcore gamers. Every talented person can be inspired by games and express the concept of gaming in their own way, like a short video. If we narrow gaming down to a small niche, we underestimate the size of the market and the power of grassroots creators in India. 

Tiki supports creators by their talent and performance, but by their category. We welcome more game creators to join Tiki, no matter (whether) they're hardcore gamers or not. They'll enjoy rewards in the form of our creator fund, exclusive traffic after verification, live monetization, and more benefits in the‘GrowWithTiki’ program along with other creators.