Megamod Team on Building a Next-Gen Platform for Creators

Intro

Serial entrepreneurs with more than 20 years of practice found Megamod:

Dmitriy Semiriazhko is a co-founder of Clowder service, who has vast experience creating applications in corporate social networks. Over 100 applications with more than 80M users on the App Store have been developed using Dmitriy's technology.

As a real geek and technology expert, Dmitriy focused on product and technology vision.

Alexey Kostarev, known for I-Jet studio, published the Happy Farmer game for social networks attracting a multi-million audience.

Using previous GameDev expertise and experience in generating $20M+ sales, Alexey focused on the marketing, business, and IR vision of Megamod.

The team at the heart of our company are amazing experts in the game industry and super professionals, each with over a decade of experience.

Vision of Megamod

Megamod is a platform for creators to develop worlds, games, and new experiences. The product was designed with younger users in mind, providing easy-to-use tools and forms for quick construction. Megamod is a platform for people who want to create and share games they enjoy. Creators, you can express yourselves and make the games you want! You can even publish your games on our platform and earn money.

Our initial vision is related to the concept of meta-universes in the game industry. That business can be divided into four main pillars: 

• Hardware and components. A business with the highest barrier to entry needs to organize and manage large physical production facilities. Not a great choice for the startup and small teams. 
• Infrastructure. The story of servers and connectivity (especially global connectivity) is just as hard to get into today as it is to get into the hardware business. This part of the market is based on the experience of telecom giants. 
• Game engines. Again, there are a lot of technical difficulties, overcoming which can miss both growth points and markets. 
• Content. This is where we're going to meet. This is an area where we and our team have had a lot of successful experiences for the last 20 years. 

It is important to understand that when we created Megamod – as a game, as a constructor, and as a sandbox – we immediately realized that we had two ways to go with content. We had the long game, where we could create content ourselves through thorns and mistakes and publish it as a game studio. Or we could go the UGC way and give it to the users. Guess what we had chosen.

Our goal here is to develop a set of user-friendly tools that will make it easy to create content for meta-universes and engage with the community.

Users

We have two groups of people that we cater to: consumers and creators. Our creators are people who have spent a lot of time playing games, studying their mechanics, and understanding their purpose and are between the ages of 18 and 20. Someone with these characteristics would likely be interested in becoming a game designer.  

But many of these guys aren't familiar with developer tools and technologies and haven't spent countless hours, sometimes years, working with complex applications like Blender.

At Megamod, we want to provide you with your first opportunity to get involved in the game industry and work with other creators to develop a complete game product with all the necessary elements. We believe that the content you create is a valuable resource.

Another part of our target audience is teenagers. But that's just our idea. At the moment, we can't set exact boundaries. First, we are a user-generated content platform, so a lot depends on what kind of games creators will create.

Toolkit

We have made all of the development tools that we could find simpler and more accessible to everyone. Our approach is like using a constructor that allows you to copy and scale elements, which speeds up the process and makes it less tedious. We want to encourage people to play, to create, and to have fun without getting bored trying to learn how to do complicated things.

At the heart of the platform is a 3D editor. And it's hard to imagine a simpler 3D editor. We cut off all the menu staff, we want it to look native for the gamers. It looks more like a constructor or a Minecraft than an editor. Using it, creators or a group of them can build a game out of 48,500 props in a few hours, test their idea, and then publish it. And all this on the first day of using the platform.

And of course, we have AI stuff in MegaCode, a component of the Megamod network. You can give commands to our advanced AI in any language. Whether it's English, Spanish, French, or even a made-up language like a child might speak, the AI understands it all. Just describe it to experience the magic. Right now, this feature can be used as part of the platform and as a standalone application (available on the App Store).

Results

In early May 2022, Megamod provided beta access to the game editor and began recruiting its first creators. Our Discord community has grown to nearly 4000 members from scratch. We have onboarded 1500 creators in 8 months and have grown our art lead crew from the best of them: the former newbies have become training newbies, helping their teams create mega games. Megamod's library contains over 25,000 games (on our best weeks, we release about 2000 games per week).

A few weeks ago, we signed a contract with a 12-year-old kid because he is making games that are much better than adults are making. It is about his cultural knowledge, the meme concepts, the emotions of the people who are going to play, and he is producing this kind of great content. Now he is a part of our team.

In another case, we have a family from Ukraine on our team who have been with us from the start. They came to us through their daughter, who was brought to us by her grandmother after seeing an ad on the Internet. And now, this 9-year-old girl works part-time as our tester. We give her all the tools we plan to release to the public. If she can't use it comfortably or understand it, we don't release it to the public.

Monetization

Right now, we're just paying for finished content. Releasing a game with us, a creator can get about $6. But the model we are actively testing, likely to arrive at soon, is a little different. Creators can publish their game on Megamod's platform, and as more players spend time playing it, they will earn in-game coins.

All the financial mechanics in our platform, which we are currently experimenting with in Megamod, are based on Xsolla's solutions. So, these MegaCoins can then be withdrawn via Xsolla's web payments.

It's worth noting that Megamod is currently in the pre-production market stage. Therefore, we are currently paying creators from our own funds. We solely rely on Xsolla as our partner and provider for purchases and payments.

Plans

In the product line, we are currently working on the mobile version of Megamod, which we expect to launch within a month. The first tests among streamers and focus groups show excellent results. In our distribution experiments, we are working with some platforms that are new to us. Last month, we launched our first games on Y8, and now we are planning to launch another batch of games for CrazyGames.

You can play and create here or check our game catalog there.

The Megamod Team