Prateek Gupta of Blue Ivory Business Solutions (RNGx.gg) & Fortumax Technologies (Gamio) on Building at Gaming Scale, System-First Thinking, and Trust-Driven Growth

StartupTalky presents Recap'25, a series of exclusive interviews where we connect with founders and industry leaders to reflect on their journey in 2025 and discuss their vision for the future.

In this edition of Recap’25, StartupTalky speaks with Prateek Gupta, Tech Founder & Gaming Growth Strategist, Founder of Blue Ivory Business Solutions (RNGx.gg) and Co-Founder of Fortumax Technologies (Gamio), who reflects on how building in the gaming industry shaped his system-first approach to entrepreneurship. Drawing from years of working with real-time users, unpredictable scale, and zero-tolerance environments, Gupta shares why gaming forces founders to prioritise resilience, reliability, and user trust over surface-level innovation.

He goes on to discuss how these early lessons continue to influence the products he builds today, from designing infrastructure that anticipates failure to leveraging AI as a quiet enabler of fairness, security, and operational efficiency. The conversation also explores his global outlook shaped by working across markets from Dubai, the role of data-driven decision-making in sustaining long-term engagement, and why discipline learned in gaming often becomes a founder’s biggest advantage beyond the industry itself.

StartupTalky: What first pulled you towards building businesses in gaming, and how has that journey shaped you as an entrepreneur?

Prateek Gupta: Honestly, gaming wasn’t the obvious choice. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t forgiving either. But that was exactly the appeal.

Gaming throws you into the deep end. Users don’t arrive politely in batches. They show up all at once. And if something breaks even briefly, they don’t complain, they leave. Quietly. Forever. That reality forced me to think differently very early on.

I learned to obsess over systems instead of surface level ideas. Scale instead of slogans. Over time, that way of thinking stuck with me. It now influences how I approach every business decision, even outside gaming. Perhaps more than anything else, gaming trained me to respect the user’s patience. It’s short. Very short.

StartupTalky:  Gaming is often described as one of the hardest industries to scale. What did it teach you about building resilient systems?

Prateek Gupta: If you build for average traffic in gaming, you’re already late. What gaming taught me, sometimes the hard way, is that systems need to be prepared for stress from day one. Traffic spikes without warning. Expectations are sky high. There’s no grace period. You start prioritising the unglamorous things. Stability. Load handling. Clean fallbacks when something goes wrong. Not fancy features. Those can wait. I still carry that mindset. In any product today, I ask one question before anything else. What happens when everything goes wrong at once?

StartupTalky: How did working with real time users change the way you think about behaviour and engagement?

Prateek Gupta: Real time users don’t lie. The data tells you the truth very quickly. You stop relying on assumptions and start paying attention to patterns. Where people drop off. When they get frustrated. How small delays change behaviour. It’s humbling. That experience made me less interested in vanity metrics and more focused on signals that actually matter. Retention. Fairness. Trust. Long term engagement rather than short term excitement. It’s not always exciting work, but it’s honest work.

StartupTalky: What were some of the toughest challenges you faced in gaming, and how did you adapt?

Prateek Gupta: The biggest challenge was knowing that there are no second chances. A brief outage, an unfair experience, a security lapse. Any one of those can undo months of effort. That pressure forces discipline. You monitor more closely. You plan more carefully. You assume things will break and prepare for it. Staying competitive meant staying uncomfortable. Constantly improving systems. Watching for weak points. Fixing problems before users ever notice them. That mindset stays with you long after you move on to other products.

StartupTalky: You are now based in Dubai. How has that shaped your current work and outlook?

Prateek Gupta: Dubai changed my perspective in a subtle way. It pushed me to think globally by default. Being here means working across markets, cultures, and time zones. Today, I apply the lessons I learned from gaming scale to serve international clients and build new products across different sectors. Gaming is still part of the picture, but no longer the only frame. The focus now is on building reliable, scalable systems that can travel across borders without falling apart.

StartupTalky: How are you using AI and data driven systems in your work today?

Prateek Gupta: AI is not a buzzword for me. It’s a tool. A very practical one. In gaming and adjacent products, AI helps in areas where humans struggle to keep up. Detecting abnormal behaviour. Improving matchmaking logic. Identifying risk patterns early. Optimising operations quietly in the background. When used well, AI doesn’t shout. It works silently. The real impact is trust. Users may not notice it, but they feel it.

StartupTalky: How does your earlier experience continue to influence the products you build now?

Prateek Gupta: Gaming compresses learning. Mistakes show up fast. Sometimes painfully fast. Because of that, I’ve become far more careful about architecture and decision making. I think more about what breaks at scale than what looks good in a demo. That experience carries over into every new product I work on. If you can survive gaming scale, most other environments feel manageable by comparison.

StartupTalky: What advice would you give to founders entering gaming or tech today?

Prateek Gupta: Start with systems, not features. Assume scale earlier than feels comfortable. Build for reliability before speed. And don’t underestimate how quickly users lose patience. Gaming teaches discipline. That discipline, once learned, becomes useful far beyond the industry itself.

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