First Post: What Apptessence Grew in Cambodia During a Pandemic
NGOs and Game Streamers Have Always Loved Each Other, They Just Didn't Know It.
The rapid expansion and technical achievements of the digital games industry, now measured over not just years but decades, continues to astonish many and alarm some. Whether you play digital games is a dividing line, which is not quite as simple as age demographics, though that is the common view.
But if those in the gaming’s in-group are more aware of the dynamism of games, with their cultural tropes, their internal economies, their intense passions, and maybe most of all, their huge footprint on the time, leisure, and ambition of their devotees, those in the out-group are probably understanding that there is increasingly no place in modern society that games can’t reach.
Our team is located in South East Asia: I’m a Canadian, and Khim, my partner, is Thai. I’m in my sixties, he’s in his thirties. In our company, perhaps against expectations, I’m the tech lead, and he’s more business. And for the last 18 months we’ve been deeply committed to a project to see what happens when games and the NGO sector combine.
What we’ve been working on might not be what comes first to your mind. Our project is to see if a fraction of the energy and dynamism of the games sector can be harnessed to help NGOs. Games as a sector is deemed to be worth $225Bn today, and will be worth more than double that in three years or so. So we don’t have to tap into a lot, in order to bring a lot to the table.
We Built Some Stuff
Over the past 18 months, we’ve built an iOS word tile game that combines some familiar elements, and some really unusual game-play machinery that makes it a distinct offering in the word-games ecosystem.
And, we’ve built a tournament management system that runs on a server, and talks to the our game when people play it. It does this when there’s a tournament organised and running on the server – something we’re in the early middle stages of launching – and when the player on their iPhone or iPad logs in from that device.
And our question right now is, “what’s the potential in this?”. I’ll talk about this more, but to find out, we’re involving ourselves with a slew of game streamers, looking for the bright lights that are in any group, who might see our vision, and want to join in.
The insight that kicked off this project hinges on the reality of the game streamer world, where a high degree of technical skill and playing prowess is on display; by some reasonably credible estimates, almost 50m people do this, for audiences in the hundreds, or the thousands, or up to the hundreds of thousands and beyond.
The Age of Audiences
We called our era The Age of Audiences in a talk I gave to iDE, an international group that works with entrepreneurial companies to solve problems that NGOs often cannot, but for which funding might not be easy to find. Game streamers are part of that audience-world, those people who interact through streaming or scheduled media produced to satisfy their followers.
Despite the huge numbers, like so much in the new digital world, monetization can be hugely challenging for these creators, who include not just the streamers, but those on multiple other platforms, including Spotify podcasters, TikTok meme-dancers, OnlyFans sex workers, and YouTubers talking about anything from restoring sailboats to Astronomy photography to makeup and fashion.
This failure or difficulty in earning a living from their streaming efforts, even for those who have tens of thousands of attentive fans, seemed like an opportunity. And that’s why we built the game, and the tournament service.
Our (un)Hidden Agenda: Capitalistic Anticapitalism
Our motivation has been to prove that a steady stream of revenue can be generated, and directed to good, worthwhile projects, often in the places where NGOs work. Living and working in Cambodia, and particularly during a pandemic, it’s been easy to see the importance of small, effective, community-rooted groups who make small amounts of money stretch deep into the communities they serve, through help in many forms.
How we do this is kind of market-adjusted model, where a combination of human impulses can be balanced, and optimized. Those impulse are in almost everyone: the selfish desire for profit, not necessarily from the sweat of your brow; the preparedness to help another in whom you recognize a value, expressed through talent or work; and a kind of pure, abstract impulse to charitable giving and be a good person, helping a world you want to see be better.
Interestingly, we learned early on when we started engaging with Game Streamers, mostly via Discord and Twitch, that there are huge number of the latter such people, who, along with their audiences, often engage in charity events that are based on streaming. That’s the pure impulse.
But also, there’s the drive to win, whether that’s rewarded with cash, prestige, or acknowledgement; the thing we feel when the competitive impulse emerges in a simple game or a quick bike ride turns into a race with another rider.
And the last of these, the impulse to assist or support someone whose skills you admire sits squarely between the other two, at the heart of the streamer/audience relationship. Game Streamers care about their audiences; their audiences really connect to the streamers they find and click with.
Our game system charges a small amount to play a game, or games in a tournament. Out of it comes a prize to a winner; money that flows to the streamer who brings their audience to the tournament; and a fraction of the total that finds its way directly into the budgets of those community NGOs we see everywhere here, who do the last-mile hard work of getting kids to school, abused women into shelters, farmers to adopt new techniques, and youth at risk into alternative careers.
We Took the Money: It Told Us To
And because we believe that a system sustained by the energy of the economic realities we live in requires it, we take our share. There’s no point becoming an NGO if you want to address a deficiency in NGO funding.
Right now, the starting balance is 40% prize, and 20% each for streamer, NGO, and our company.
How these are balanced is the thing we’re fascinated to learn. What combination will produce the most attractive combination that game streamer audiences will respond to? After initial live testing with audiences that have donated via GoFundMe, and then played the game in tournaments, from around the globe, we’re starting to bring those bright light game streamers to see what we’ve built, and experiment with their audiences to try to learn what will work best.
Having introduced the project here – and this use of Substack is also an experiment for us – we’re going to be reporting back here with what we learn. And if this grows, as we think it can, this will be the main place that we talk about the journey that we’ve already been on for these many months, as it extends further. We hope you’ll join us.
Dan, Apptessence Founder.