PlayMakers has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding to boost user-generated content across a wide spectrum of games.
Founded just a year ago by Ilan Nabeth, Maxime Niankouri, and Costantino Carrega, the PlayMakers team, consisting of former Homa employees, has already marked impressive achievements with a collective 600 million game downloads during their previous roles.
The pre-seed funding round saw substantial interest from prominent investors, with RockawayX leading the round. Key business angels, including Sébastien Borget, Vincent Hart de Keating and Hugues Ouvard, also participated, contributing to PlayMakers’ vision of transforming gamers into creators.
PlayMakers envisions empowering players to become content creators through a platform allowing game studios to harness the passion and skills of their community. Users can craft new game assets such as 3D characters, animations, and music, among others. The team has eight people.
This white-label platform is tailored to each game community’s unique characteristics, facilitating seamless implementation of player-made creations into the game with a single click. Developers can renew gaming experiences with fresh content or monetize the creations, unlocking new revenue streams.
Nabeth, CEO at PlayMakers, said in a statement, “With the rise of generative AI, more and more players are turning into creators. It’s becoming easier to create valuable content, and players are historically extremely keen to contribute. With PlayMakers, we are supporting small and big game studios to involve their players in the game conception thanks to a dedicated and powerful platform.”
As the gaming industry embraces the era of user-generated content, PlayMakers positions itself as a company at the forefront. Notable industry players like Epic Games and Krafton have heavily invested in user-generated content, with Fortnite dedicating 40% of its net profits to creators and Krafton allocating a $100 million fund for their creators.
The funds raised will be strategically deployed to enhance PlayMakers’ toolset and expand the team to support an array of studios eager to collaborate with the company. PlayMakers aspires to become the go-to platform for fostering gaming community involvement, offering an unparalleled experience for gamers and developers alike.
Martin Kupka of RockawayX said in a statement, “We are convinced that the upcoming wave of web3 games will focus on turning players into creators, and PlayMakers offers the perfect, easy-to-implement solution for developers to collect, curate, and integrate player creations. We already see strong demand from the market and are excited to continue supporting PlayMakers on their journey.”
Origins
Nabeth said in an interview with GamesBeat that he was one of the first 10 employees at Homa, which went on to raise $150 million to make mobile games. By the time he left, it had grown to 300 people and it had more than 100 million downloads.
After leaving, he went on to Headline, a $3 billion tech venture fund that invested in Sorare, which has been one of the biggest sector successes with its non-fungible token (NFT) soccer game.
“This is where I learned a bit more about blockchain space and interoperability topics,” Nabeth said. “Because we invested in the seed of Sorare, I really wanted to build something a bit more meaningful. I saw that opportunity in the gaming ecosystem.”
He looked at LiveOps and user-generated content and decided to dive in deep.
UGC
The company has a pipeline of 15 game developers that it wants to onboard for its UGC platform. At the beginning of the second quarter, the company will start helping the creators grow their UGC games.
“We want to involve players in the game creation process,” Nabeth said. “A player can start making new game assets like a new weapon, or new music or animation, image, etc. You will be able to implement it inside the game in order to renew the game experience, or unlock new monetization options.”
For example, you can decide to sell some of these assets made by the players as cosmetics.
“From the platform, we guide the players in becoming creators,” he said. “We’ll put different tools and different resources to make it super simple for casual or professional people to make valuable game assets. We involve the community in deciding what content should be part of the game or not. Players can vote on all these contributions, and they decide what should be implemented inside official updates inside the game. And lastly, we check these assets from a technical perspective.”
Nabeth’s team collects all the incompatibility issues so that the game development studios can implement the content in one click. His team handles all the QA, all the debugging, in an automated way.
Nabeth wasn’t so familiar with UGC at the outset. But he knew that teams had to constantly add new content to existing games to keep players coming back. He thought that if you simplify the process of creating UGC, then the updates could complement the work done by internal game developers.
“We can improve the games,” he said.
As a fan, Nabeth said it would drive him crazy when he created something the community liked but the game developers ignored it.
“I thought there could be a better way to connect players and use these creations in a smart way in an efficient way. And we want to play as accordingly as well,” Nabeth said. “I knew that frustration as a creator. I know the gaming industry. As an insider in the space, I think there is a big opportunity to help midsize game development studios in leveraging UGC. It shouldn’t go exclusivity only for Fortnite or Minecraft. And this is what we’re trying to do with PlayMakers and making UGC accessible for anyone.”
Borget at The Sandbox is one of the investors and he’s a strong believer in UGC. Such investors are encouraging PlayMakers to expand its reach to different platforms. To distinguish itself from big UGC platforms like Minecraft, Fortnite and Roblox, PlayMakers is enabling anyone to contribute to a game with a tool of their choosing. The firm will also work with smaller developers with niche games.
Nabeth believe that generative AI will help with the creation of UGC in the long run.
Revenue split
Nabeth said that about 70% of the revenues associated with the UGC will go to the studio, while 30% will go to PlayMakers and the creator.
The company is onboarding 15 companies to leverage the platform. Nabeth said PlayMakers is focused on Eastern Europe and the U.S. markets first.