Galactic Group has launched a new Web3 gaming publishing division, Galactic Entertainment Publishing.
Based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, the company has executives who used to work at Disney and Sony, and their charter is to back innovative triple-A games from emerging Web3 game studios.
The cofounders include Mark Meyers, former head of Disney Entertainment Studios. He is chief product officer at Galactic Entertainment Publishing, a division that is looking to redefine the gaming landscape with the launch as one of the world’s first play-to-own publishers. At Disney, he previously managed more than 600 game develpers across seven studios.
Rather than setting out to build a franchise in a vacuum and throw it at the market when it’s done, Galactic is taking a different approach – building with the community first and introducing the concept of the play-to-own model.
Galactic Entertainment aims to elevate Web3 gaming to triple-A standards. That’s not an easy thing to do, as many people in the West are wary of Web3 games as shallow or being outright scams. Despite a few years of trying, Web3 games are only beginning to reach mass market audiences.
PlanetQuest
Galactic Entertainment Publishing’s debut game is PlanetQuest, which features Hollywood talents behind The Batman, Star Wars IX, Avengers, and Mortal Kombat, gaming talent from Fortnite, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
PlanetQuest is a cinematic gaming experiment that brought together over 250,000 fans who, over the past two years co-created the storyline and lore of the Star Wars-like franchise, which culminated in a soon to be released trilogy of books, comics and a game that’s due for early access later this year.
PlanetQuest, aims to create a cinematic multiverse from the ground up, with a diverse product offering that includes a video game, decentralized storyline, book, and graphic novel. The game leverages blockchain technology to give gamers full freedom to own and trade in-game assets, bringing digital property rights to video games in a move that is expected to drastically change the gaming landscape.
“Naturally no first attempt at something new is perfect, but it’s been amazing getting to create
a sci-fi universe with the fans in a way that’s never been attempted before,” said Galactic’s chief creative officer Jon McCoy, in a statement. “I’ve gotten to fulfill a lot of my childhood dreams, working on Star Wars, Blade Runner and Marvel movies to name a few, but there’s little that compares to being able to interact and build with the fans from day one.”
Galactic believes the currently dominant free-to-play model is starting to show cracks. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on ads each year to acquire new players, driving up publishing costs, which just end up being charged back to the players as more and more expensive in-game purchases and making it harder for developers to earn a living.
“Involving the community early on and rewarding them for their participation with in-game goods that they actually own benefits publishers, developers and players, by reducing publisher ad spend, providing the feedback developers need and getting the players better games,” said Meyers of Disney fame, in a statement.
Innovative play-to-own model
Galactic said the key to this new approach is the play-to-own model, which opens up the economy of entertainment franchises, through the use of blockchain technology, allowing fans and players to own and trade anything from in-game items to entire planets, along with the franchise’s own currency.
This provides the opportunity for early adopters to own a piece of an entertainment universe they love and does away with situations where players who want to trade are left to rely on the black market and even risk having their accounts banned and everything they played for years to obtain taken away from them in an instant.
“It deserves to be said that we believe the current free-to-play model is broken,” said CEO Loren Roosendaal, in a statement. “It’s crazy to think that players are spending over $100 billion dollars and 100’s of hours of their spare time each year, gathering in-game items they don’t actually own. Let alone that when someone tries to sell any of these, we, at best, give them a chance to do so for store credit and at worst chase them down with the ban-hammer.”
With PlanetQuest, the publisher’s first franchise has just launched a major airdrop campaign allowing fans to start accruing in-game currency, soon to be followed by a line-up of titles across various media. Galactic has also recently secured the rights to build out a similar play-to-own gaming universe for an undisclosed billion-dollar Hollywood movie franchise.
That will help give Galactic a jam-packed year ahead of it as a publisher. And it will help Galactic pave a new path in entertainment and community participation in games. The company will use blockchain tech to create new immersive experiences, and it believes community-driven decisions and ownership will be the new standard for global entertainment.
The self-funded journey
In an email to GamesBeat, Roosendaal (a veteran entrepreneur who previously cofounded Ember Sword) said that the publisher has been self-funded so far by the founders, and they have been able to raise funds for the games directly. They will reveal later how much has been raised so far for PlanetQuest.
“The publisher itself has a smaller core team of executives and works with a large network of partners for day-to-day execution, as well as several studios that are working on our debut IP PlanetQuest,” Roosendaal said.
There are about 60 to 70 people, both internal and external, working on titles so far. The talent working on PlanetQuest has previously worked on titles such as: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Crysis, Battlefield, Devil May Cry, God of War and Star Citizen.
Good timing?
I asked why the timing was good to move into Web3 publishing. Roosendaal said we’re seeing a shift in the videogames industry in general, with more developers realizing that free-to-play as a model is starting to show cracks.
He noted that user acquisition costs continue to skyrocket.
“Meanwhile, during COVID, hiring went on at a massive pace and we’re now seeing a lot of talent come on the market. Where two years ago, coming into GDC, very few game developers were showing interest in building for Web3, this year we see them actively approaching us to talk about titles they’re looking to bring there,” Roosendaal said. “On top of that we’re getting to the point where those serious about building good product in Web3 gaming have actually had some time to build. As you know, building a good game isn’t typically a one-year process.”
The first free-to-play titles were anything but stellar, he noted, and the same should be true for the evolution in play-to-own titles.
“In short, it’s a great time to get into Web3 publishing because we have a growing lineup of great studios looking to bring great titles to this market and thanks to our experience on both ends of the spectrum, we can help more traditional game development talent understand the Web3 side and help link up those on the Web3 side with the right talent and experience to actually build out great games. As a publisher this is a huge part of what we do,” Roosendaal said.
Player acceptance
As for mass market adoption of Web3 games, Roosendaal said, “Much like free-to-play adoption will probably not come from massive triple-A productions from day one. It took a while to get from Farmville to Fortnite. Yet in the span of 10 years free-to-play went from 2% of games revenue to 50% and all the way to 85% in another 10 years after that.”
He added, “As more compelling new titles and even interesting franchises, that may well come from outside of gaming primarily, find their way to fun play-to-own experiences that offer the benefits of an
open economy without the drawbacks of having to tinker with wallets and seed phrases, I believe we’ll see the advantages of true ownership and deeper community involvement starting to shine. I think the winning models will also include titles that involve the community early on in making the games and rewarding them for it. Today the gaming market is heavily ad-driven, and if we can redirect funds typically spent on ads for user acquisition to invest in our player base and use them to build out our success, it will be a much more sustainable and player-focused economy.”
He pointed to examples in traditional gaming, like the multi-year early access for Baldurs Gate 3 and the
community movement created by a title like Helldivers 2.
“Imagine that kind of community involvement becoming a broader phenomenon and extending both earlier into development and later into the live operations of the title,” he said. “We also see great opportunity in mass adoption through building a broader universe. At Galactic for example, with our debut title Planet Quest, we’re not just building a game, we’re creating an entire universe that includes books, comics, games, and more. This expansive approach sets us apart and caters to a wider range of interests, which is much like building out a franchise like The Witcher, but with books, comics, games, series and movies in mind from day one.”
I also asked Roosendaal if Western gamers would be receptive to Web3 gaming. He said that, much like today Western gamers are playing titles like Fortnite, League of Legends, Destiny, Valorant and many others that wouldn’t have existed the way they do today without the free-to-play model, “we believe in the end play-to-own will similarly become a dominant force and be widely accepted as (when well executed) being better value and just as fun as free-to-play titles.”
He added that it will take time.
“Some early contenders have given Web3 a bad rep and some of that is definitely deserved, much like many of the first free-to-play titles were nothing to write home about,” Roosendaal said. “That being said, some comparisons lean into the unfair as people scoff at folks spending thousands of dollars on a freely tradable digital item in a Web3 title, while today free-to-play operates on the spending of whales some of whom routinely spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on items they can’t freely trade in free-to-play titles.”
Roosendaal said he looks forward to a time when true ownership of items in games is generally accepted as a nice thing (naturally that also needs proper economic design to not turn in to a pure pay-to-win fest, which is definitely not a favorite amongst western gamers), along with the concept of already owning something in an upcoming title and the fact that you do giving you a voice in its development.
“I think in the end, if these tools are used responsibly it will lead to more innovative titles being funded, less dependence on the more traditional publisher model, better experiences for gamers and better economics where money previously piled into ads ends up going towards rewarding developers and building out the community around a title,” Roosendaal said. “In the meantime of course, we’ll still continue to see plenty of titles coming from the Web3 side that aren’t great, or aren’t great yet, I’m sure we’ll make our share of mistakes too as we explore this new model, hopefully we won’t be judged too harshly for it and it will create some great titles that the world would otherwise have missed out on.”