Dots.eco, a platform for real-world environmental rewards, has emerged as a for-profit company that can help game companies grow their audiences through a common interest in saving the environment.
Since 2022, the company has partnered with over 40 games with a collective one billion downloads, including Scopely, Playtika, Plarium, Wooga, Miniclip’s Iliyon, and more. An estimated 100 million-plus players have participated in Dots.eco planet saving activities. And this week, Supercell, Zynga and Rovio are all turning on their integrations related to environmental themes.
Through the real world rewards program, players can plant trees, protect wildlife, clean oceans, and more, just by reaching milestones, purchasing game items, making website purchases, or completing game missions. The game becomes the conduit for doing good, said Nadav Grosz, CEO of Dots.eco, in an interview with GamesBeat.
Dots.eco is a partner in The Playing for the Planet Alliance, an initiative facilitated by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Today, the program is kicking off today with 57 studios participating in its annual Green Game Jam with the project’s official Go-Live date.
“We thought: What if every game could offer impact this way?” said Grosz. “When our pilot with Playtika’s House of Fun showed record-breaking results, we knew this had to become a platform.”
Hay Day is Supercell’s farming-centered casual title that empowers players to protect nature. For the Green Game Jam 2025, Hay Day is spotlighting pollinator habitat protection through a campaign supporting conservation organisations via Dots.eco and On the Edge Conservation, turning player engagement into real-world conservation results.
In Wooga’s June’s Journey, players are rewarded with animal- and plant-inspired decorations as part of the event, while behind the scenes, Dots.eco is enabling real conservation action on the ground.
And in Social Point’s Dragon City, players can join the Environment Day Pass to help plant real trees through Dots.eco. They’ll receive a personalized certificate showing their real-world impact by completing missions and unlocking the Environment Day Monument or the Spiked Leatherback Dragon.
Origins
Dots.eco was founded by university friends Grosz, a tech-savvy serial entrepreneur, and long time environmental activist, and Daniel Madrid Spitz, who has extensive background in operations and sales, as a pivot from a positive-impact gaming studio named Ethical Wizards.
“We started seeing traction with one of our games and already thought about offering our impact stack as an SDK so that other games can use it. I wasn’t so sure about the results of the game, and wanted to consult with my friend Tal Friedman, who at the time, was the GM of Playtika’s House of Fun,” said Grosz. “When he opened our analytics, the results of our game were so good, that he immediately offered that we’ll run a test with House of Fun. The players loved it, and the results were above any expectation. We were shocked, and this is how Dots.eco was born.”
With very little funding to date, they have managed to sign contracts and integrate into some of the biggest games and studios in the industry, build deep technology and generate massive impact.
Founded with a mission to save the planet and to engage players in their games, the business is going well so far. Over 3 million players won a Dots.eco certificate and made an impact that contributed to a cause. They planted 1,400,00 trees, saved 800,000 sea turtles’ hatchlings, protected 7 million acres of wildlife habitat, cleaned 400 tons of ocean plastic, restored over 30,000 corals, and more.
The best performing campaigns boosted total revenues by 10%, increased first time paying users by 20%, increased gameplay by 25%. Pretty good for a company with just 13 people and about $1 million raised to date.
“We’re a service that was started after I had a gaming studio. This was called the Ethical Wizards, in which I created sustainable games. And I saw the need for a deeper solution, technical solution, and trusted solution for adding environmental impact in a way that is traceable, reliable, trackable, transparent into games,” said Grosz.
They came up with a wide variety of missions where gamers could do good, like planting trees, and realized there were ways to verify that the trees were getting planted through satellite images and AI.
“We get images, videos, everything we upload to our platform, and analyze everything, check different measurements of progress, how the project progressing, if it’s satisfying, if it’s delivering according to the promise or not. And all of those projects, we convert them into quantifiable micro units,” Grosz said. “We call it dots. Those are the dots, and these are used in games to motivate players to perform actions, to progress in the game levels, to place in app purchases, remove ads, and more.”
They send out certificates and 18% of players who get them share it. That becomes a path to virality for the game, boosting a game’s popularity and social awareness.
“That helps the game get return visitors,” Grosz said. “We have attention and other parameters, and it shows that we can increase gameplay 25% for the first-time paying users. These activities can fit any game. Our momentum is strong.”
“We humbly believe that we might have the formula here to do real, transformative change, because donation and charity, it’s nice people feel good about it,” said Madrid Spitz, in an interview with GamesBeat.”To make real change in this whole transformative change, we really need to harness the businesses, the system that we live in. So I found that as the most exciting part of what we do, showing that this is our positive growing KPIs, businesses understand what is there.”
How it works
- The Dots.eco platform exposes an API to over 250 vetted global environmental projects that are constantly monitored, including by satellite imagery analysis, images from the grounds, and reports, analysed by inhouse AI technology.
- Dots.eco can integrate naturally with many game themes, as it supports a wide range of animal species, habitats and subjects that are present in almost every game.
- Games integrate the API, or the Dots.eco Unity SDK, and incentivise in-game milestones, or In-App-Purchases. For example, you will save a sea-turtle, or buy 10ft2 of land for wildlife, protect your game hero animal, for downloading the game, reaching a certain level, buying a skin or removing ads.
With very little funding to date, they have managed to sign contracts and integrate into some of the biggest games and studios in the industry, build deep technology and generate massive impact.
Background
Dots.eco is a platform for environmental rewards that transforms millions of micro-casual actions into real-life environmental impact. The company can celebrate each individual who takes positive action for their company, their life, and the planet.
By integrating into games and other apps, the company is building the world’s largest community of impact makers and collectors and are dedicated to converting daily actions into transformative impact for a sustainable future.
As a B-Corp certified company (a company working for public benefit), official partners of the UN Decade for Ecosystem Restoration, part of Google Startups for Sustainable Development and a nominee for the Earthshot Prize, the company is committed to making a real difference.
Dots.eco believes that environmental impact can be closely aligned with business growth, and that it has the formula to make a truly transformative change on the planet. Dots.eco’s goal for 2025 is to increase its impact by 10 times from 2024 and build the world’s largest community of impact makers and collectors.
“We’re incredibly proud of the scale of our impact so far, but even more so of the environmental awareness it’s building in the global gaming community. We believe gaming can make a transformative change on the planet. And we’re working toward a future where 5 million Dots isn’t a milestone, it’s a monthly, weekly or daily norm,” said Grosz.
Dots.eco’s activities span beyond gaming, and it has already partnered with some of the leading companies out there, whether through their loyalty programs, employee benefit programs or direct integration into their products, from media buying, travel, to insurance and even electric car rental. One of our main goals is to create the world’s largest community of impact collectors, and to expose more people to sustainable gaming experience, providing more value to our partners.
World Environment Day – June 5
This week, the company and other groups going live with in-game environmental activations across several top studios and genres, timed to celebrate World Environment Day. These activations allow players to contribute to real-world impact, like planting trees or protecting wildlife, through regular gameplay.
Participating titles include Angry Birds Dream Blast (Rovio), Dragon City (Social Point), Hay Day (Supercell), Best Fiends (Playtika) and June’s Journey (Wooga). They all started on June 4.
Players will be able to contribute to real-world restoration projects by progressing through storylines, completing missions, or making purchases, all seamlessly integrated into each game’s theme and mechanics.
“It was a great pleasure to collaborate with Dots.eco for the June’s Journey Wildlife Week campaign. We aimed to make this campaign more prominent and exciting for our players compared with previous years, and Dots.eco provided fantastic support to achieve this goal,” said Galina Fedulova, Lead product marketing manager at Wooga.
These are not just good for the planet – they’re good for business. Past campaigns using Dots.eco’s platform have boosted revenues by over 10%, increased first-time payers by 20%, and increased session time by 25%, all while earning the highest sentiment scores some studios have seen
“We partnered with Dots.eco for our Earth Week Community Event in Triple Match 3D. This collaboration was a huge success, significantly boosting our game’s KPIs and positively impacting our social channels. We’re excited to work with Dots.eco again to create more meaningful environmental initiatives,” Ori Nabarro, Head of product and game design at Boombox, in a statement.
Why gaming is a good match
“We need to harness a train going really fast. We can either try to shift it off the rails, doing degrowth, stopping everything, or jump on the train and try to harness it,” Grosz said. “There’s a huge stress on our environment. I don’t know if we’re ready. The oceans are getting darker. We understand there are several crises around the environment that we’re facing. It’s not just climate. It’s biodiversity as well. It’s the oceans getting bleached. If the acidity levels change by a lot, this entire layer of plankton can collapse with it.”
As for gaming, it’s a perfect match, he said, because the industry is versatile and the audience of gamers knows they can change the world.
The company is aware that many people in the population are climate change skeptics.
But he said, “People love nature. It doesn’t matter if you’re Republican, if you’re Democrat. You love nature. Maybe you don’t agree about something, but you love your nature. You love the animals around you.”
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