- After six weeks, Facebook users have consumed over 30 million minutes of the RIVAL PEAK franchise
- Episodes of RIVAL SPEAK, a companion show hosted by Wil Wheaton, have over 22 million views
- Over 600,000 Facebook users have registered for RIVAL PEAK, which is most popular in India, the United States, Mexico, and Brazil
- Users have generated over 400 million points to save the characters from elimination
- Launching Jan 20: RIVAL PEAK instant game comes to iPhone
Introduction
We are now six weeks into RIVAL PEAK’s twelve week story. RIVAL PEAK is the first ever “MILE”, or “Massive Interactive Live Event”. And…
Introducing Rival Peak
Starting December 2nd at 9:30PM ET/6:30PM PT, Facebook will be debuting a new interactive reality show called Rival Peak that’s powered by my company, Genvid, with design and creative by Pipeworks Studios and DJ2 Entertainment. You can find it at fb.com/rivalpeak. I could not be more excited to share this experience with the world.
Rival Peak may look like a game — and it is the culmination of a decade’s efforts to create the world’s first native cloud streaming experience. …
Last year I founded Genvid Technologies, a company that builds esports broadcasting tools, along with my incredible co-founders and early employees. Having spent years working for CEOs of Square Enix Holdings, before starting this company my background was in game publishing and development. I wanted to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned since founding Genvid for other entrepreneurs in this space to benefit from, specifically on decision-making, managing investors and priority setting.
Decision-making
When we started Genvid, I identified three areas where we could focus our initial efforts. As we we founded the company in spring 2016, the virtual…
Today is long in coming. The Genvid SDK, which lets you deploy your game instance to the cloud and create rich interactivity over popular streaming platforms, has finally reached “General Availability.”
We’ve spent a year and a half sharing the Genvid SDK only under NDA, in confidential talks with developers around the world, making improvements and upgrades, and now any developer anywhere can download the Genvid SDK and begin livestreaming.
We’re launching General Availability alongside a lot of news:
- A brand new Genvid Technologies website including a new Developer Portal where you can download the Genvid SDK and view its…
When we see numbers about the growth of the Esports business, we normally see those numbers separated from the game industry overall. And all too often, we do not consider the underlying power dynamics of the games ecosystem, and how the Esports business is situated within it.
The plain truth of this ecosystem is the hegemonic power of the game content owners, be they publisher or developers.
Interactive streaming is one of this year’s major trends.
This month we’ve seen Netflix announce “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style shows. Last month saw the rebranding of Microsoft’s Beam to Mixer and the introduction of co-streaming. And Twitch began testing interactive overlays on their website directly.
We’re seeing an expansion from the passive streaming that built the livestreaming industry. Passive streaming is where you have players, and you have viewers, and those two segments are bifurcated apart from chat.
Instead, interactive streaming breaks the bifurcation and turns this bifurcation into a spectrum. Everyone becomes a “participant.”
Do you want to actively…
Video game economics and consumer expectations are rarely aligned. You can call it the 2015 Konami problem. The profitability of tremendously detailed game worlds is a problem that is much more nuanced and difficult than sales numbers suggest, and success can be dependent upon consumer expectations.
Zynga, after years of meandering in the corporate strategy doldrums, saw the fruits of its 2014 acquisition of NaturalMotion and released an iOS game with tremendously high levels of graphics quality (for a mobile title): Dawn of Titans. Kudos to NaturalMotion for surviving the budgetary battles that were necessary to put a beast like…
This article reposted from my VentureBeat Op-Ed.
Last week saw rumors of a potential $200 million deal between Riot Games and MLB’s streaming subsidiary BAMTech. While still a rumor, if true, the deal would be a strong sign of the next great gold rush for game developers: direct viewer monetization.
The game-viewership market is already established and massive (YouTube, Twitch, etc.), but most publishers consider the streaming ecosystem to be a marketing tool. Revenues take a meandering path to game developers in the form of increased awareness leading to sales. …
If recent announcements are any indication, the future of Japanese VR lies in a remnant of gaming’s past: Japanese arcades. This is a fascinating trend that is sure to accelerate in coming years as Japanese arcades invest into room scale VR that differentiate their offerings relative to what can be played in Japanese homes.
Earlier this year I was chatting with a Japanese game executive about how VR development was going in Japan. “Still awakening” was his answer. …
IGN had an excellent article looking at the Japanese indie scene over the weekend. For me, the question of the Japanese indie scene is a question of looking at its market agnostically, and to do so we should remove economic assumptions of development and distribution that we have in the West. IGN did this well, but I want to unpack some further perspectives.
When I was running Shinra, we looked carefully at the worldwide indie scene, and indeed hired people with strong connections so that we could converse directly with creators. (I don’t know a better team to tackle both…
Jacob Navok
CEO @ Genvid Tech, formerly Shinra Tech and Square Enix
