My first angel investment: Playerstate
The passion & creativity of community creators is vastly untapped. Playerstate is a global co-creation platform that provides creative players a safe place to connect, create, collaborate and earn from working with their favourite titles and publishers and I am thrilled to be able to join this funding round with them as my very first angel investment.
Gaming is a specialist subject of mine and the market is growing ~incredibly~ quickly. Yet there continues to be a visible divide between publishers, platforms, and creators as we’ve seen with the likes of Activision’s Call of Duty titles regularly delivering disappointing updates & progression in the lore, skins, maps, and character additions to the game, regardless of their recent ad that promotes their closeness with their gaming community.
As someone who understands business and the power of community (as the founder of Dffrnt) but also as a regular gamer I see publishers losing out on huge commercial and creative opportunities simply by not listening to what their community wants.
Enabling players & fans to co-create content of all kinds for titles they love, enables the creator economy, passion economy, and bridges the gap between business and gaming.
With talk of the ‘metaverse’ seemingly picking up speed lately and the recent $1 billion investment into Epic Games by play-making investors including Sony, the world may not be too far away from a player-created universe akin to the environments described/shown in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One book & film adaptation. The question in this burgeoning future though is how the players get rewarded and how we avoid a dystopian future controlled by monopolistic companies (shown via the ‘IOI’ corporation in the same titles). The answer now includes Playerstate, whose work will enable a constant stream of communication between all stakeholders and, hopefully, a better, more collaborative version of ‘the Oasis’ as a result.
I’m super excited to support Dean and be on the journey with Playerstate and, again, a huge thanks to Matt, Francesca, and the Ada Ventures program for making this possible.
—
Building something cool in this space? Drop me a line at ash(at)dffrnt.so.
