Get to the labs is a new Web3 game publisher formed by the collaboration of gaming startups Rough House Games and Overworld. The deal brings together serial game entrepreneurs Chris DeWolfe i Jeremy Hornall in the name of solving the game discovery problem.
All they propose is to democratize game publishing through a proprietary marketing and distribution platform that rewards players for playing and sharing the games they love. Reach will incentivize players, influencers and guilds to push players into games. Reach aims to decentralize user acquisition and make it more social, reducing reliance on platforms like Facebook and Google.
DeWolfe, who became famous for co-founding MySpace and Jam City, leads Rough House Games with backing from A16z. Meanwhile, Horn runs Overworld (backed by Hash) and co-founded the Web3 firm Xterio. Horn has a long history in gaming at companies such as FunPlus, Jam City, TinyCo and Gameloft. Xterio itself raised over $80 million.
Reach Labs will begin by developing and operating a diverse portfolio of high-quality cross-platform games, including Rough House Games’ Champions Ascension, a critically acclaimed Web3 fighting game, along with the anticipated Overworld titles, codenamed Conquest, an action role-playing game for PC and consoles, and Kingdoms, a free-to-play mobile strategy game, with several additional projects in the pipeline.
DeWolfe has taken a journey to get to this stage. He started Jam City with Josh Yguado and they grew it to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. But when Apple prioritized user privacy over targeted ads a few years ago, user acquisition began to falter even as its costs rose.
DeWolfe studied the Web3 market and saw opportunities to both improve user acquisition and reward players. He turned his Champions Ascension Web3 game into a new venture-backed startup, while Yguado stayed on at Jam City as CEO. DeWolfe also started Plai Day as an experiment with social images created by generative AI. Horn had a similar journey, realizing how difficult mobile gaming had become and how Web3 games offered a better way to monetize and restore the virality of user acquisition. More details on how the partnership works will be released later.
DeWolfe and Horn often talked together about how user acquisition was inherently broken. And they also saw that games weren’t social enough. While comparing notes, they decided to come together in a “very deep partnership and work on a platform called Reach,” DeWolfe said in an interview with GamesBeat.
“Everyone is working together to solve this big problem. Our platform incentivizes players, influencers, game creators, and guilds to push players into virtually any game. It democratizes the whole process where you would have to go to Facebook or Google and pay a bunch of money”.
The Reach platform
The Reach platform offers game developers and studios an innovative distribution solution to address significant headwinds in the gaming industry, such as fragmented audience attention, increasingly crowded markets, and rising marketing costs and user acquisition. With Reach, fans and creators can directly impact the growth of a game by engaging their friends and communities while earning rewards for promoting and recruiting new players.
Reach Labs has partnered with Keystone Protocol, a decentralized social networking technology that enables true social virality, to provide a secure economic infrastructure to democratize distribution, empowering and rewarding players, creators and communities to come together around games that they love
“Game developers face considerable challenges in capturing and retaining a consistent player base,” DeWolfe said. “Reach relies on new technologies to make games more visible and social rather than relying on centralized platforms that bypass content creators.”
DeWolfe added: “Our solutions allow players to bring a network of friends to games while being rewarded. We are ushering in this new phase of the industry with our new distribution solution and making our technology available to partners to build its player base. Together with Overworld, we’re redefining what it means to grow a game’s community and allow anyone to become a stakeholder.”
Reach takes a player-centric approach to game publishing, marketing and monetization, leveraging community engagement to drive its growth. The platform provides Reach participants with tools to manage accounts, promote titles and drive community growth, enhancing engagement by encouraging social interactions that extend beyond gameplay to engage the player’s entire social network.
By bringing more high-quality games into the Keystone protocol, Reach believes the network effect will increase exponentially, making Reach the new marketing and distribution standard for a new era of gaming.
With the Reach platform, people can generate affiliate codes and promote games through social media, Twitch, and friends. Users can collect a portion of the revenue spent in-game for their referrals, making user acquisition profitable from day one.
“Xterio is excited to announce the formation of Reach, a partnership between our exclusive studio Overworld, Rough House Games and the Keystone Foundation,” said Michael Tong, CEO and co-founder (along with Horn) of Xterio, in a statement. “Reach is set to redefine how players engage with and profit from the games they love. By offering real incentives, we’re empowering communities to turn their passion into meaningful rewards.”
Tong added: “This joint venture will expand Overworld’s capabilities and strengthen the entire Xterio ecosystem. Together, we look forward to democratizing distribution, welcoming a diverse network of third-party partners into our ecosystem, and enabling them to grow their games with the support of their fan communities.”
Reach plans to aggressively expand the number of games using the Keystone protocol through acquisitions and partnerships with other game studios and platforms. The first of these partnerships will be the Xterio ecosystem with its growing portfolio of game titles. The combination of companies will have around 40 people.
DeWolfe said Rough House Games developed the blockchain technology and donated it to the Keystone Foundation. The Keystone Foundation is a non-profit organization that oversees the Keystone Protocol, an on-chain technology designed to revolutionize user acquisition for blockchain games. The foundation is committed to expanding its gaming ecosystem, using its network to drive growth for both developers and players.
The Reach platform will initially focus on Web3 games, but aims to work with any game, leveraging blockchain technology.
Some of this sounds similar to Forge, founded by Dennis Fong and Kun Gao and spun off from GGWP, but Forge focuses on community building and campaign marketing, while Reach is more about affiliate marketing and ad tech, Horn said.
Under a more crypto-friendly administration in the US, DeWolfe believes that regulatory changes and the release of games that reward users will cause a significant explosion in the Web3 gaming market.
As games and brands push players toward user-generated content, Horn and DeWolfe believe blockchain is even more relevant.
Changing political and business winds
Horn said that with the change in political administration in the United States, there will likely be more crypto-friendly regulation that will facilitate projects like the Reach platform. But both men noted that they will comply with the jurisdictions’ regulations as necessary and that they will not proceed too quickly until there is clarity on the regulations.
Meanwhile, high-quality and fun Web3 games are starting to arrive and garner a large audience, such as Pirate Nation.
“Now we’re seeing people coming from Web2 and creating quality games,” DeWolfe said. “I know for a fact that there are dozens and dozens of triple-A Web3 games in development. There’s so much great content out there that it’s hard to discover.”
DeWolfe said mobile is stagnating with the top 100 games still dominating, with very few new entrants because the barriers to entry are so high. While games can be made by small teams, the user acquisition costs can be huge, DeWolfe said.
“I came into the video game industry because I love games, and it’s very sad to know that a new team that has a passion for the products will be crushed, not because the product is bad, but because it has no chance of even being discovered,” he said. “Hopefully, with Reach, we can give those developers an avenue.”
Horn said he sees Overworld games as hybrid Web2 and Web3, or Web 2.5, games. They will be released on mobile first and will have an alternative website where players can participate in Web3 trading.
As for Champions Ascension, DeWolfe said the game is fully playable with multiple modes such as PvP and PvE, as well as tournaments.
“We’re polishing it,” he said. “It’s a triple-A game. We’re going to integrate Reach into the game. We’re really excited about it.”
He expects hundreds or thousands of games to eventually benefit from Reach.
“We’re trying not to just connect to Web3, but we could be Web 2.5,” DeWolfe said.
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