Democratizing positive play — GGWP goes free

My love of games began with the release of Doom in 1993. The idea of playing against other people online, in real-time, was mind-blowing to me, and I was instantly hooked. Like many others, that moment changed my life forever. Back then, the gaming community was small but welcoming: we hung out on IRC, lugged our PCs to each other’s houses for LAN parties, and played till the wee hours of the morning. While my parents accused me of being anti-social, they didn’t realize that I was actually making many friends through games — some of whom remain my best friends today. I even started playing competitively, eventually becoming the World Champion of Doom and Quake and winning John Carmack’s Ferrari in a Quake tournament.

This lifelong love for gaming also brought George, Kun and me together. Like many others during the pandemic, we found ourselves using games as a means of socializing and hanging out with friends. And it was during one of our long gaming sessions together — where we were being consistently subjected to toxic behavior from random teammates — that we began asking ourselves why such disruptive behavior had become so commonplace in games and more importantly, why so little progress had been made to address it.

We spent many months afterwards talking to our friends in the industry, some of whom were founders of the most successful games and platforms in the world. And it was through those conversations that we discovered the immensity of the problem. Games often rely on human moderation, but the problem is well beyond human scale: the most popular games receive billions of player-submitted reports annually and even the most committed moderation teams are only able to respond to less than 0.1% of those incidents. It’s also estimated there are five to ten times more toxic incidents that go unreported. We knew there had to be a better way.

As we decided to embark on this epic quest of starting GGWP to try to tackle this problem of toxicity in gaming, the most important question was WHY are we doing this? While we didn’t know at the time whether anyone was willing to buy the tools we were building, we were driven by the idea that by making gaming experiences safer and more positive for everyone, we were also making the world a better place.

We’ve come a long way since founding GGWP three years ago and now count dozens of games, including AAAs, as our customers. And while we are proud that we’re able to help games who reach millions of players deal with disruptive behavior, our goal has always been the same: to make our tools accessible to every developer.

That’s why today, we’re thrilled to announce that GGWP is now available to everyone, for free! We’re making our best-in-class AI-powered Chat, Player Reports, and Username moderation tools available at no cost up to ~5,000 MAU, after which you only pay for your usage. We hope that by going free, we can make it easier for developers to create healthier and more positive communities for all of us.

GLHF,

Dennis “Thresh” Fong