Why the next big consumer platforms are social games

With an avatar, users are freed from their physical realities (for example age or physical ability). For use cases like entertainment, education, mindfulness, and even professional networking, this means users have the chance to extend their capabilities and opportunities well beyond what is possible in the analog world.

As Ryan Holmes wrote in Fast Company, “socializing is way more fun when you’re doing stuff.” With the increasing popularization of gaming culture, we think gaming will much more frequently be the “stuff” we’re doing while we’re socializing and interacting with each other.

This trend is driven in part by the rise in technical sophistication for more complex game ecosystems, which are expanding and becoming democratized through game engines like Unity and Unreal.

We’re now observing that consumer social experiences are starting to look and feel like games at every level. Remote networking events in Roomkey are not a panel of Zoom screens; instead, attendees create virtual avatars and can navigate around a virtual conference room on their phones. On the education platform Koala, teachers can create virtual c... See more

Rather than having gamers on a platform connect with one another in third-party online channels, many successful games now enable and promote the usage of in-game socialization. Players meet and chat on platforms like Fortnite and Roblox, which both boast hundreds of millions of MAUs spending hours a day in their ecosystems. Fortnite, for example, ... See more