Forge, the platform for community-driven game marketing and engagement, today announced Forge Direct, a kind of self-service gamified hub that allows game developers to launch fully customizable, feature-rich community portals.
Unlike traditional game websites which typically serve as static landing pages, Forge Direct is aninteractive engagement platform complete with quests, loyalty rewards, and direct-to-player commerce that developers can host on their own domain to complement—or even replace—a traditional web presence. So far, players have completed 25 million quests with Forge.
“It’s been extremely successful so far, and we basically got to a point where, around late last year, in order to scale up with the demand that we’re seeing from games, we’ve essentially made our tools self serve,” said Kun Gao, CEO of Forge, in an interview with GamesBeat. “This is a continuation of everything we’ve been building so far. The games can themselves, manage their experiences, so that they can now put them” on their own websites rather than just on Forge.gg.
Disrupting the way things are done
For years, game developers have relied solely on platform-driven discovery through storefronts like Steam, iOS, and Google Play, where visibility is controlled by algorithms and revenue is limited with high platform fees. Forge Direct changes the equation by empowering developers to drive discovery and monetization by going direct to community.
“We thought about it and it made a lot of sense to have them create their own web sites using our tools,” Gao said. “We’re giving them all this functionality and giving games the ability to build feature rich, community growth driven portals, but all on their own domain. So we think this is the future for game distribution.”
In the past, commerce brands sat behind department stores or Amazon. Then they all went direct to consumers and built their own feature-rich online destinations.
“We’re doing the same for games by giving them all the tools to be able to turn their existing static web pages or website into like a full-featured community powered with discovery and engagement.”
He said, “With on on these destinations, games can basically roll out really rich experiences, loyalty programs, reward programs, and drive their web shops, amplify their socials. They will build additional engagement in game. And it’s basically a first of its kind game hub, if you will, for community growth.”
This gives any game developer or publisher the ability to gamify their community in terms of building social engagement via platforms. They can incentivize players to add things like join the Discord channel for the game, or follow the Twitter account, and the game company can reward the player with various game-related rewards. Forge calls these “quests.” Developers can easily add new quests, giving rewards in exchange for players doing things that add to the engagement with the game.
“We have a self-serve dashboard. The game can basically use this to manage all their assets so that they can customize how the experience looks for players,” Gao said.
At the end of the day, a player can wind up with a lot of points from the quests, and they can use those points to engage more with the game.
Taking back control
With Forge Direct, developers can launch a fully customizable game hub on their own domain, where they can curate quests that drive social discovery, wishlists and reviews, in-game actions, friend referrals, and more.
In return for completing quests, players earn Loyalty Points that can be redeemed for exclusive in-game content, rewards, community status, and more.
Webshops have become common as a means of helping developers retain revenue, but driving webshop usage can be a challenge. Forge Direct integrates with leading webshop providers, and acts as an ecommerce amplifier, creating new ways for game developers to reach players, encourage adoption of their webshop, and reward direct purchases with loyalty points.
Finally, Forge’s 360 Analytics and Google and Facebook pixel integrations gives developers unparalleled access to deeply understand their players and track the performance of their marketing campaigns.
“Game Discovery is Broken—We’re Fixing It”
“Marketing costs are skyrocketing, and developers need a direct connection to their players, not just a presence within these walled gardens,” said Kun Gao, CEO of Forge, in a statement. “With Forge Direct, studios finally have a system built for community-powered growth that fuels discovery and commerce—rather than relying on expensive ads and unpredictable platform algorithms.”
Getting started is fast, easy, and free, Gao said. Launch your own Forge Direct hub today at [Forge.gg].
Since launching in late 2023, Forge has partnered with over 75 games, helping studios boost discovery, retention, and engagement through more than 25 million completed quests. Now, with Forge Direct, the company is putting that same powerful feature set directly into the hands of game developers—giving them the tools to build thriving communities, drive meaningful actions, and unlock new revenue streams.
Founded by gaming pioneer Dennis “Thresh” Fong, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao, and Cyence founder George Ng, Forge originated as a project within GGWP, an AI-powered game moderation platform that the team launched in 2020, Forge’s mission is to make user acquisition and community engagement accessible and effective for all developers, enabling them to focus on creating amazing games.
The platform launched in late 2023 with an $11 million seed funding round, led by Makers Fund, Bitkraft Ventures, and Animoca Brands, with participation from Hashkey Capital, Polygon Ventures, Formless Capital and Adaverse. Forge’s existing investors include industry-leading strategics such as Griffin Gaming Partners, Riot Games, and Sony Innovation Fund.
Forge’s angel investors include gaming industry leaders Riot Games founder Marc Merrill, Twitch founders Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin, TSM founder Dan Dinh, Kabam founders Kevin Chou and Holly Liu, YouTube founder Steve Chen, Krafton CEO CH Kim, former Discord CMO Eros Resmini (The Mini Fund), and ESL founder Ralf Reichart.
Forge launched more than a year ago and since then, Forge has recruited 75 games to its community platform, and it has helped those games add hundreds of thousands of players to their game communities.
“We call it Forge Direct because it’s basically giving games the ability to now go direct to their community, and go direct to their players, to be able to build that game and player relationship and be able to now engage directly with their with their audience, on a platform that they themselves, own and operate,” Gao said.
The result is saving a lot on marketing expenses and gaining efficiencies from marketing efforts.
“You’re amplifying the effectiveness of your go to market. You’re amplifying your effectiveness of your existing marketing campaigns. You’re amplifying the effectiveness of your existing engagement campaigns,” Gao said.
These efforts get players more engaged and that increases the overall virality of any other existing engagement efforts. Gao thinks every game marketer, developer or publisher will want Forge Direct for their games. The company is making Forge Direct accessible. For indies, it is essentially free. As games get bigger, with hundreds of thousands of players, Forge becomes more of a data platform. And then Forge charges a software-as-a-service fee. Customization is also something Forge can charge for.
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