A Boston intellectual property company is bringing works of art to you, but you may have to figure out how to play Fortnite or Roblox to see them.
Spaceport was founded by serial entrepreneur Le Zhang, founder of Squaddle, and his co-founder Lida Tang, who helped build gaming franchises like Saints Row and Bio Shock. The founders saw a gap between digitization and content creation and created Spaceport to fill it.
The premise behind Spaceport is to democratize intellectual property to help "user-generated content,” or UGC, flourish. Video games like Roblox and Fortnite enable users to create consumable content such as gameplay videos, character outfits, and tutorials without the aid of entertainment studios.
To date, Spaceport has worked with such companies as Threadless.com and Toei Animation, one of the oldest animation studios in Japan. Its most recent collaboration is with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
“We're bringing their IPs to the masses, to UGC creators, so that they can create fun and compelling content that's legal and accessible from day one and incentive-aligned with the original IP owners,” Zhang said.
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Spaceport provides users access to existing and popular intellectual property, increasing its reach and expanding players' cultural palette.
The partnership initially provides users with access to eight pieces of artwork curated by the MFA. According to Zhang, the partnership extends to over 500,000 art pieces in the MFA catalog.
Players can use art from the MFA to create customized clothing for characters to wear or as art for backgrounds or game design. For instance, in honor of artist Katsushika Hokusai's birthday on Oct. 31, limited-edition UGC shirts of the "Great Wave" were released on Roblox.
Eventually, Zhang wants to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital by creating incentives and events at places like the MFA that encourage players to see and learn from these works of art.
“Part of this partnership is providing access to this class of IP, which the younger generation has overlooked, and making it available to those key creators to build really fun and exciting experiences in an authentic way, where the content is not being forced down players throats,” Zhang said.
