The Rush Gaming Universe (Pt 1)
Today, I’m excited to talk about what we’ve been busy building at Hike.
The Rush Gaming Universe
We’re building The Rush Gaming Universe (RGU). The RGU is a new kind of virtual world, a brand new social gaming universe. A place of fun & entertainment, where players can use their skills to Play, Compete & Win.
In just 12 months from launch, the RGU is now doing $50M Gross ARR 🚀
Our community is battling it out in over 100M gameplays per quarter across 10 of India’s most popular casual games. In a category where there are many ‘Supermarkets’, we’re aiming to build a ‘WholeFoods’ (a place of quality).
The Rush App
All of this activity is happening inside the Rush app that we launched in beta 12 months ago on iOS & v1.0 just 9 months ago on Android.
You can download the app here — getrushapp.com
The Rush App is the 1st of 3 pillars of the RGU.
The Vision Thing 🦋
So where is this all headed? Let’s talk about the ‘Vision Thing’.
Over the last 18 months, it’s clear that we’re entering a new era of gaming, where players will participate in a new kind of game economy where they’re also owners of the networks they help create 🏠
Gaming has always been an incredible source of entertainment, a way to bring joy to people’s lives. And now it will also be a means to provide brand new economic opportunities to the world 💰
The RGU community has always been at the center of everything we do 🙋♂️🙋♀️ (Our community just voted new mods last week! — https://t.me/rushtheapp)
And now the blockchain introduces a paradigm shift in the way products & communities can be built.
With smart contracts, players can play games, generate digital assets based on their skills & gameplay to become true owners in the network.
It’s beyond incredible seeing this work in action. It really is magic 🪄
Web 2 & 3 (not Web 2 vs 3)
Projects tend to be bucketed in either Web 2 or Web 3. This is not very Consumer First, is it? (it’s VC first 😜).
Most consumers have no idea what these terms mean. They don’t need to know. That’s our responsibility. It’s our job to bring the latest tech to consumers that delivers enormous value to them in simple & slick way.
The RGU as it exists today is a mobile-only platform + built off-chain with fiat currency. 3 reasons why →
- Mobile Crypto Infra is still it’s early days. The wallet infrastructure today is built around a browser + chrome extensions and still needs to evolve to mobile
- Most Consumers ❌ Crypto Wallet so it’s important for us to build an experience that broadens our TAM and also be the reason why people are onboarded onto crypto
- Blockchain Scalability until recently has been a challenge. Now with L2 chains we can finally build scalable products
Where others see a challenge, we see opportunity.
So we ask why shouldn’t platforms like ours (and others) be the reason why 100s of millions of people are onboarded onto crypto?
That’s exactly what we’re doing. Fortunately, a lot of the underlying tech has evolved fast (L2 Chains, ZK Rollups etc). Some of it we’re building ourselves 🛠 👀
12 months ago, we planted the seed for the 1st pillar of the RGU. In 2022, we’re excited to double down 🚀. There’s a lot more coming. Come BUIDL with us — work.hike.in.
