RPGGO 2024: Built, Learned, and Next
As we’ve stepped into the new year, it is a good timing for us to summarize our path in 2024 and expectations of 2025.
What we have built
The product team dropped off a good summary of what we achieved in 2024. We concluded significant milestones together, and those works distinguish us from other AI products in the game market tracks. It was an amazing journey for a lean startup team to accomplish so many things in one year, and our work demonstrated our commitment to advancing the field of AI gaming.
What we learned
AI + Gaming is a brand-new topic full of challenges and excitements, and yet we did encounter some detours and setbacks while exploring the boundaries of technology.These experiences made us stronger and led us to gain deeper insights and confidence in what the future will look like.
As an AI gaming company, the fundamental starting point for establishing our company is not merely to create enjoyable games but to enable UGC (User Generated Content) to collaborate with AI in crafting fun games. Therefore, AI drives the core value of our products. We carefully designed to what extent AI can automate, empower, and simplify the creative process, and how our products can showcase these distinctions simply. When making decisions about our product features, we have indeed made some concessions due to current AI limitations. However, upon reflection and product iterations, we acknowledged that our focus should not be whether AI works today, but rather its future potential. If we are confident in the future of AI, perhaps our product‘s design should be more forward-looking and AI-native.
2. Blurring the Boundaries Between Creators and Players.
We initially made a hypothesis that creators would transform from players, who might request more specialized AI powered tool and support. However, seeking to construct an AI product that can empower the creation of open worlds, our initial assumptions unnecessarily introduced barriers which splits the role of creator and player, which also limited our imaginations on user’s expectation in creation. In fact, in the new era of AI and UGC, there should be no distinction between creators and players. Through robust features for multiplayer co-creation and real-time version synchronization with detailed authentication is the path towards creative work in the UGC era. Our products should focus more on strengthening these two dimensions to facilitate transformation.
3. Community-created IP takes time to grow.
We believe that new IP will emerge from community co-creation within UGC platforms. However, we don’t have clear numbers on how long this process might take. High-quality user-generated content requires ample time to accumulate and mature. Therefore, a well-designed community co-creation incentive mechanism is crucial. When a game world is collaboratively created and cultivated with love and efforts, mechanisms developed for community management, incentives, and even commercialization will turn into the fundamental driving force autonomously powering its continuous growth, sustainably complementing and enhancing development on its own.
What will be our next
Our current multimodal product format is not a truly immersive interactive experience. As we look to 2025, RPGGO is excited to pioneer a groundbreaking product format that encapsulates our vision for the future of gaming.
As both a creator and a player, Iyou can quickly build a game world using AI, including maps and initial NPCs, and then continuously refine the basic storylines, iterating character designs, game mechanics, and clues while exploring the world. The game would then evolve into an AI-powered town moving forward autonomously on a timeline. Players can enter this mini-world with their own profiles and avatars, experiencing its world view, NPCs, stories, quests, while gaining rewards through task completion, item collection, NPC collection, or earning coins through work.
2. Uniting Creators and Players.
Players who join the game world can also choose to become creators themselves. During their exploration, they can propose improvements to the AI game, including plot, materials, worldview, characters, etc. With the approval of the majority of the creator community, these changes can be applied to the game world. This combination of playing and building represents the unique evolutionary capability that AI brings to the next generation of open worlds.
3. Persistent AI-driven Characters.
In this game world, we do not deliberately label who is an NPC and who is a player, leaving it for players to discover. Unlike traditional games where a player’s character becomes inactive when they exit the game, in an AI world, a player’s character can continue to evolve in AI form even after the player logs out.
While managing a vast world with thousands of concurrent users remains a challenge, our focus will shift towards creating numerous interconnected smaller worlds, each with its own unique narrative and community. This approach not only manages the load on AI resources but also enhances the diversity and richness of the gaming experience.
We believe this product format presents the next generation of open worlds, and this is what we aim to achieve in our next version.
BY CEO@RPGGO