Roby John On Building SuperGaming: Game Engines, Battle Royale Extraction, And The Brazil Bet
Inside the Pune studio's decade-long bet on owning the tech layer, from a post-Y Combinator dead zone to Brazil, MENA and 200 million installs.
Here is a number that should bother anyone building a consumer product in India.
Roughly 70% of the money spent on games in the app stores goes to titles launched before 2020. That is Roby John’s figure, and it makes a lot of consumer strategy stop making sense. A market where seven of every ten rupees flow to five-year-old incumbents is not really a market. It is a queue, and the queue is closed.
Roby, co-founder and CEO of SuperGaming, has a word for this.
If you’ve been playing Fortnite for a while, there is no incentive to switch out. Fortnite, your friends, your skins, your purchases are all there. That’s why 70% of the revenue earned in the app stores goes to titles made before 2020. We call it ossification.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
He stopped selling the game
The standard answer to an ossified category is to build something better and wait for taste to shift. Roby kept making games but stopped treating the game as the product.
His model of the industry is worth stealing. He argues there are only two genuinely great gaming companies, Valve and Epic, and both are built in three layers: a proprietary engine at the bottom, content in the middle, a marketplace on top. Everyone else rents the bottom layer from whoever owns it.
So SuperGaming spent a decade on the bottom layer. Its shooter framework uses Unity as a runtime, then swaps the rendering, memory and networking systems for custom modules, so games hold up on Android phones with 4GB of RAM. Underneath sits SuperPlatform, a live-ops backend built with Google Cloud and licensed to outside studios. Bandai Namco’s official PAC-MAN mobile game, a franchise past a billion downloads, runs on it, along with MaskGun and fifteen-plus other titles. Roby says the framework has now shipped on 200 to 250 million devices.
Every game makes the engine better, and a better engine makes the next game better. That’s how we de-risk. There’s no silver bullet here, just multiple lead bullets.
He puts the revenue split at roughly half platform and co-development, half SuperGaming’s own titles. For a hit-driven business, that ratio is the whole strategy: it buys time in market, and time in market buys shots on goal. Investors followed. A $5.5 million Series A in 2021, then $15 million in August 2025 at a $100 million valuation, close to 5x the earlier mark, with a16z Speedrun, Bandai Namco’s 021 Fund, Steadview and Skycatcher on the register.
The pearl diver, and the pronunciation problem
In a battle royale, 99 people out of 100 walk away with nothing. That is the genre, and also its churn problem. SuperGaming’s answer is BRX, battle royale extraction, where loot you carry out of a match persists into the next one.
A pearl diver jumps to the ocean floor searching for a pearl. He doesn’t find one every time, but he comes back with lobster, or oysters, or maybe seaweed. All of it has real world value. Extraction shooters work like that. You bring something back from every raid.
He did not make winning more rewarding. He made losing less total. Indus, which launched worldwide in October 2024 and took Google Play’s Best Made in India Game that year, now carries the BRX name on the stores.
Where he points that engine is the part founders should argue about. By Roby’s numbers, in-app purchase conversion in India runs under 1%. In Brazil it runs 6% to 12%. He still launched in India first, because roughly 500 million Indians have played a battle royale and feedback arrives in hours. He calls the past year his hardest and most useful, with core metrics improving 3x to 5x. Then he pointed the engine somewhere it could pay. In March 2026, Prime Rush launched in Brazil with Spacecaps, parent of the esports org LOUD, set on a floating battleground called Maré. A MENA edition follows with PlayHera.
One detail stayed with me. Indus struggled abroad partly because nobody could pronounce it.
What we noticed from a UA perspective is that when people see Indus, they don’t install it. You’ve got to have a name that’s third grade English friendly, so everybody can write the spelling.
Prime, because Amazon taught the world it means good. Rush, because shooters already shout it, and in Brazilian Portuguese the R softens to a hush. Four years of world building, rescued by phonetics.
What actually compounds
None of that is the moat. Roby has built software with his CTO for 24 years, and the founding team has held together for 15, against his own observation that most good studios take a decade to work. Before SuperGaming there was Tap2Learn, a Y Combinator company that died on the problem of convincing children to play and parents to pay, leaving him in what he calls a dark zone for two years.
Which is why his closing line lands.
There will be a Black Myth: Wukong moment in India. We’re probably five, seven years away. Indus was an ambitious idea, and we kept our head down and got it out. We’re not successful yet, but we’re heads down figuring out the next thing.
A founder with 200 million installs, PAC-MAN as a client and a16z on the cap table, telling me he has not made it. In my experience that is the most reliable signal a founder is still compounding. The ones who declare victory have usually stopped.
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