A Web Platform, Really?
Hey all, Aaron here.
About one year ago, I had a call with my longtime friend Bjorn, and showed him a prototype for a new game platform that I’d been working on for a few weeks. After 10 minutes of my excited rambling, Bjorn said he’d like to help, and I asked him to cofound a startup with me as CTO. And so, PlayFly was born.
The concept is a little hard to explain. It’s a web game platform, but not like other web game platforms. It’s a “UGC platform”, but we’re not trying to make the next Roblox.
What we’re making is a place where any game in any genre can live, as long as that game incorporates user generated content in a fundamental way (and runs on the web). The easiest way we’ve found to explain what we’re making:
“It’s a platform for games like Mario Maker. But imagine if those levels could be shared in a URL and played in a browser.”
In other words, our platform supports games, and those games support user-created content. Then those games take a backseat while that content creators make is shared and discovered across the web. The game becomes sort of an engine for the UGC.
A platform of platforms.
The history of user generated content goes back almost as far as the history of games. We believe it can be transformative. And there are a small handful of games that launch every year that thrive on a stream of great UGC. We are building a platform to make it easier to launch and maintain those sorts of games, by handling all the hosting, discoverability, and social features that are needed.
“So you’re adding AI, right?”
In those first few months, we spent a frankly disgusting amount of time making pitch decks, and had some early calls with venture capital folks. They liked what we were building, but virtually every call had some variation of the following question:
“So are you going to incorporate AI into the platform, and let players build games with prompts? It seems like this is the future!”
No - we are not.
We’re building this platform to help human creators thrive, and we believe human creativity is the past, present and future of games and other creative media. We’ve watched as the game industry lays off talented people by the thousand. Meanwhile, the web and virtually every social media platform becomes enshittified and sloppified, while people with capital push AI down the throats of consumers who mostly hate it.
We are not “anti-AI”, per se - it’s an exciting technology, and we see its potential to help with engineering, content moderation, automation and other tasks that computers excel at. But we don’t want to build a machine to replicate and replace human creators - we want to build a place where those creators can thrive.
We quickly discovered that this puts us out of alignment with a pretty large portion of investors today.
So with this experience (and the fact that we hate pitching but love building stuff) we decided to forge ahead and build the foundations of the platform we believe will be best for creators, developers, and players.
We’ll need capital at some point to scale, but we’re happy to bootstrap this, for now.
(But hey: if you have money and want to help bring to life an alternative game platform that’s meant to support creative humans, you know where to find us!)
Introducing Player Galaxy
Today, we’re announcing a rebrand of the platform, to PlayerGalaxy. We believe this best encompasses the human-centric nature of what we’re building - and hey, we’ve got a .com now!
Here are our core beliefs:
1. Web+UGC Is a New Paradigm For Growth
We believe the web, combined with UGC can have a fundamental impact on a game’s ability to grow an audience. When creators can share something they made as a URL, and anyone can play it on a PC or phone without downloading anything, it reduces the viral friction to as close to zero as you can get.
This turns a game’s virality into a game design problem, which we think is really exciting.
2. Players Need Fundamentally New Experiences To Show Up
Corporations spend billions trying to launch competitive new game platforms, and mostly fail. So how do we think we can grow? By offering players new ways to engage with games that they can’t anywhere else.
Fun, exclusive games aren’t enough. Having zero-friction UGC sharing helps - but fundamentally, we know that for players to show up and stick around, we’ll need PlayerGalaxy to feel like a fun new way to engage with games. In the coming months, you’ll see us introduce playful new features at the platform level that don’t exist anywhere else - features that enable new types of play and social interaction.
3. We Can Make the World a Better Place
Fundamentally, we want to make a positive impact on the world with PlayerGalaxy. We want players to feel good about the time they spend here, and we want to provide a financially viable alternative to other game platforms for professional game developers and talented creators to earn a living.
Roadmap
We (Aaron and Bjorn) are building the core of the platform, along with some early prototypes to kick in the tires (We’ve launched 3 so far.) Our first priority is to build up a community of creators and players, and to make sure the foundations are strong.
Next, we want to build in monetization for creators - the creative humans who make content using the games on PlayerGalaxy. This could take the form of creator subscriptions, tip jars, or direct payments for content. Giving creators the ability to earn money will be essential to help us scale up the quality of content here, and we hope this will help us grow faster, as those creators build their own communities here.
Once we’re confident the foundations are strong, and we have a thriving player/creator community, we’ll (carefully) start inviting third party game developers to launch their UGC-ready games here.
How Can I Help?
First of all - join the PlayerGalaxy Discord and say hi! It’s a small community, but we have to start somewhere!
Are you a creator?
Make an account and start creating and sharing stuff!
Are you a game developer?
Register your interest in working with us here. And let’s have a call!
Are you a gaming influencer/content creator?
Check out some of the awesome stuff that’s already been published on the homepage!
Are you an investor, an advertiser, or want to get involved in some other way?
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