User-generated content creators now have their own dedicated awards series.
Yesterday, April 23, the WorldBuilder Summit announced the WorldBuilder Awards, an awards ecosystem intended to highlight leaders in the user-generated content space. The organizers of the conference revealed the inaugural WorldBuilder Awards on stage at the user-generated content conference yesterday, April 23, awarding glass trophies to winners in three categories: Studio of the Year, Innovation in Storytelling and Developer Advocacy.
This year’s WorldBuilder Summit brought in 260 attendees, overselling the 200-seat capacity of its venue at The London in Los Angeles. (Disclosure: I spoke at the event, and its organizers covered my travel and lodging fees.)
“Next year, we’ll be doing a full world builder awards program,” said WorldBuilder Summit organizer Scott Benzie during the conference’s opening address. “This will be expanding to two days. We will get a bigger boat — we had to turn people away at the door this year.”
Winners of the inaugural WorldBuilder Awards were not notified in advance. All winners were also speakers at the awards, and received their trophies after their panel sessions, in lieu of an official award ceremony. Justin Peress of DoBig Studios accepted the Studio of the Year award, with former Meta developer advocate Deepak Nair receiving the Developer Advocacy award and creators Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane receiving the Innovation in Storytelling award for their work staging a Shakespeare production inside Grand Theft Auto Online.
The recipients of the inaugural WorldBuilder Awards were determined through a discussion between the WorldBuilder Summit’s founders and partners, according to WorldBuilder Summit event director Grace Lind in an interview with GamesBeat.
“A lot of it came down to community involvement and how dedicated they are to the space,” she said.
Lind declined to comment on exactly how many WorldBuilder Awards the event plans to hand out next year, but said there would certainly be more than three awards in the future.
“This is our first year, so we had to start small, but we have a lot of plans and goals to expand,” she said.
The WorldBuilder Summit and its inaugural awards reflect the growing amount of advertiser attention and dollars flowing into the user-generated content ecosystem — and thus the growing need to highlight and reward excellence in the space.
“I think it’s great,” said JOGO Studios co-founder and chief operating officer Chad Mustard in an interview with GamesBeat about the first edition of the WorldBuilder Summit. “I haven’t really really seen anyone try to bring the multiple communities out there together, and we’ve got UEFN, Roblox, and other people around.”