UGC Hidden in Plain Sight
Creator Stories Podcast Summaries - Mythical, Pocket Worlds | Bits of Signum | 09.24.24
We are immersed in UGC and so when we learn about new platforms, we get excited! We are calling this article UGC Hidden in Plain Sight and the picture says it all. See podcast summaries below.
Will you be at Epic Games Unreal Fest in Seattle next week? If so, we are hosting a "burning questions we are asking developers" cocktail party on Tuesday with special guests Patrick Moran of Look North World, Pete Hawley, and Jason Chen, who led the Gossamer film project on UEFN and is working on some new exciting entertainment ideas. Come to learn and share ideas on building the future of entertainment!
Podcast: Anton Bernstein, Founder & CEO of Pocket Worlds - How Highrise is Empowering Creators and Shaping the Next Generation of Social Gaming
Two weeks after Roblox Developer Conference and two days before Epic Games’ developer conference, Unreal Fest Seattle, we are joined by Pocket Worlds Founder & CEO, Anton Bernstein on Highrise, a less well-known UGC platform, built by Anton and team. Spoiler: Highrise is seeing tremendous growth - at 120 people, they are profitable! We thought it might be useful to show Highrise in a chart relative to other UGC Gaming and other Social Media.
They didn’t intend at first to build a UGC platform, but every roll out of new UGC tooling and content resulted in a jump in engagement. So the team leaned in, rebuilt Highrise in Unity, and launched Highrise Studios, where creators can develop entirely new 3D game modes, environments, and assets.
For all of you who say “I don’t get it” we find that this often is due to the demo. In this case, Highrise has 2m MAUs, mobile, is predominantly female, 20 years old, and spends 80 minutes/day on average over many sessions, and there are 5k - 6k contributing creators. The community creates; the platform promotes. This is a must listen!
Podcast: Arron Goolsbey, President & COO Mythical - Gaming as the Hero Use Case for Web3
Mythical COO Arron Goolsbey brings passion in helping CEO John Linden execute his vision. Arron believes the hero use case for web3 is GAMING and he is already helping Dot Play, supported by the Polkadot community, in executing our vision to empower creators! 👨🏼🎤🧑🏼🎤👩🏾🎤
Arron spent 20 years at the world's very 1st trading card game, Wizards of the Coast, in the late 1990s. Then he landed his dream job at Activision Blizzard leading the Battle.net platform, supporting the biggest games in history 🎮
At Dot Play, we are having a lot of fun! Mythical Games's presence in the ecosystem can't be understated because new opportunities, especially with larger players, are coming to us because of Mythical 👾
Mythical has roughly 2x the transaction and sales volume compared to the #2 player in web3 gaming, as tracked by cryptoslam, with only one dominant game. 📈
That game is NFL Rivals - the official game of the Kansas City Chiefs (hometown of Angela Dalton 🎉) with three of the last five Super Bowl WINS. 2024 drew 123.7 million, the largest TV audience in history. Why did the NFL choose NFL Rivals? #1 factor - the game had to be fun 🏈
First Party games to demonstrate player-driven and creator-driven worlds. A moment of achievement unlock occurs and voila, a higher growth revenue model is born! Third Party games to allow others to use the platform. Coming soon! Pudgy Penguins 🐧 and Nitro Nation World Tour by CM Games 🏎️
Why Polkadot? It is the entire package - industry leading tech, security, scalability, resilience and democracy - it is future-proofed and behind the scenes enough to allow the team to focus on executing, *not* crypto narratives 📈
Arron says let's be honest, blockchain is plumbing and you don't always want to know how it works. But if it exists, why not use the best plumbing that could potentially handle 100x what others offer? 💪
Players are competing for the coolest stuff to express their identity (yes normal gaming behavior) "Quick trades" allows them to find buyers of the items they don't want and sellers of the items they do want. Players swap (cashless) Tokens aren't used for speculation 🚫
NFL Rivals numbers (this NFL season vs last season): Net revenues +49%; in game sessions +52%; time spent +30% (note: mobile industry revs flat/down) More than 5m players; 800k wallets. PS Mythical owns "Rivals" so theoretically they could work with another game/league 🤯
Mythical's gift to the industry 🎁 Over a year ago, after a lot of work to reach an outcome, Apple and Google app stores allowed NFL Rivals.
The next compute platform will tap into all ecosystems in a curated fashion. These are the building blocks of the metaverse. We will see gaming as the hero use case because winners will drop the user complexities. GAME ON! 💥