Exclusive Interview: "Our Major Revenue Comes From Content Creation," Says Rushindra Sinha

Meet a doctor by profession and an avid gamer by passion, Rushindra Sinha, 29-year-old CEO and founder of Global Esports. He feels proud to be in the gaming industry, Rushindra Sinha completed his medical degree and went on for further studies in management from Stanford University. Today, he also owns Women's hospital in Bandra, Mumbai. His best friend and rock support is Mohit Israney, co-founder and a filmmaker by profession. Their 24-year friendship turned them into entrepreneurs when they were just 16 years old. In an exclusive interview with MobyGeek correspondent Imran Fazal, Rushindra Sinha spoke in depth about his journey in this multi-crore gaming industry. Read the excerpts.

Gaming is not considered as a full-time profession in India yet. How did Rushindra Sinha get introduced to gaming?

I remember when I was just 3 years old I started playing games on PC which was kept at my parents' hospital. It was a black and white computer meant for patient data entry. I used to sneak at night and play Chips Challenge game which was a default application during those days. After that, I started playing on consoles and later I was introduced to LAN gaming and we played Counter-Strike and participated in LAN tournaments. I have played various games professionally. My schooling days were spent playing games.

How did your family support you in this venture? 

(Laughs) I have 26 doctors in my family. My parents and family members have been extremely supportive throughout my journey. They always allowed me to follow my passion. When I completed my MBBS degree in 2014, I went immediately to San Francisco and worked at a place called Hacker House. It was meant for new startups. They also allowed me to work in a startup firm in San Francisco which gave me a lot of exposure. Later I moved to Los Angeles to work with another startup and so all this helped me a lot to raise funds for our startup.

You and your team also managed to earn via gaming at a very young age. Can you recollect those days? 

I worked with a few of my friends and we managed to reverse engineer the entire game of Ragnarock. We managed to become the number one private server for Ragnarock online players in the world. We roughly made 2,500-5,000 USD a month, which at a very young age of 16, was a large amount of money for us. We continued for two years and later we started concentrating on our education. In 2008, we were fortunate enough that our server and entire data was purchased by a company based in Australia.

Today, we are noticing a boom in the gaming sector. Where do you see the future of eSports? 

India has a huge scope for the gaming industry. Looking at this growth we are planning extensions in Singapore. We have registered an office in Los Angeles. We have also collaborated with Harrisburg University for providing scholarships to Indian gamers. We have given importance to education and learning also. Moreover, an Indian gamer can get a chance to study abroad and be a part of Harrisburg University's eSports team. We are also concentrating on content revenue. Our major revenue is from the content we create so we plan to focus on multi-dimensional areas.

What are your future plans for Global Esports? 

Today we have a team of 103 people including pro-players. We have 12 teams across the globe. We have our headquarters in Mumbai with a boot camp for players. We have opened a boot camp in Seoul, South Korea. With so much growth in the gaming industry, we also registered an office in Los Angeles so that we can extend our operations. We have been approached by investors from abroad and we plan to extend our reach to multiple platforms. Basically, our focus will be to win hearts even if we lose tournaments. In the end its eSports, one cannot win every time. It is part and parcel of the game.

When we talk about managing talent. Do you have any mantra to motivate and train pro-players at your boot camps? 

What makes us different is that we are creating an ecosystem for gamers. We create content and the boot camps are the best place for focusing on eSports. When young players come to boot camp, they have all the facilities at their disposal. Even when he doesn't feel like playing games, he will look upon other teammates and play with them. Our support staff continues to motivate these players so that they perform well. Training sessions are held and mistakes are rectified. We also have other teams that are registered with Global Esports and they continue to perform well in tournaments.