Anyone familiar with online gaming knows its greatest problem: toxicity. Players are extremely creative in finding new ways to be horrible to each other — and not just in terms of sending derogatory messages.
GGWP, an office-less company based in the Bay Area, has just emerged from stealth and raised a $12 million seed round to attempt to combat that toxicity. The firm uses AI to monitor chat logs and detect antisocial behavior, such as quitting a match early, intentional friendly fire, hacking and other behaviors gamers hate.
The company is backed by big names in the gaming industry, with Bitkraft Ventures leading the round with participation from Makers Fund, Griffin Gaming Partners (GGP), Sony Innovation Fund, Riot Games. Industry bigwigs Twitch founders Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin, YouTube founder Steve Chen, Krafton CEO CH Kim and gaming influencer Pokimane also are investors.
The company was co-founded by Dennis Fong, former professional gamer and founder of the company Xfire; Kun Gao, founder of the anime streaming site Crunchyroll; and AI expert George Ng.
“During the pandemic, we would play together and people would be upset about how the lesser-skilled of us were playing, and we would hear a lot of hate and toxicity," said Fong, the company's CEO. "The three of us being serial entrepreneurs talked amongst ourselves about figuring out why this problem still exists."
They called their friends at the head of Riot Games, the creators of League of Legend, and Twitch, the online gaming-focused streaming site, to shoot their ideas about how to prevent toxicity. Fong says the companies liked their ideas but said they did not have the resources to implement them.
"So we decided to create our own startup with help of our friends at these bigger companies."
GGWP — a play on the commonly used acronym "good game, well played" — uses AI to track and create reputation scores for each player to give companies operating online games more context and historical information about their users so they can decide how to respond to reporting incidents and if they should ban a player.
But they also track good behaviors, such as sharing items, reviving a downed teammate and other pro-social actions integrated into the games
The company currently has 35 employees, half in the Bay Area, is currently looking for office space. Last year, the company was just about to sign a lease in San Mateo, when the delta wave of Covid-19 hit and it held off looking for permanent workspace.
“In a lot of online games, what you do can be far more toxic than what you say," Fong said. "If a guy rage quits because he's losing in a game like League of Legends or Overwatch, basically there's no way you can win. We want to find a way to prevent this."
