Kun Gao: When COVID hit, we were stuck at home, hanging out and playing games together online. We realized that gaming was as toxic, if not more so, as we remembered in college, and we said, “Why isn’t anyone doing anything about this?”
George Ng: Kun, our co-founders, Ling and Dennis Fong, and I — we all have young kids. I was looking at our kids being more involved in interactive experiences online and seeing how scary it was.
Kun Gao: We ended up connecting with some of our friends who publish games, and they told us that it’s very challenging for them to look at all the large datasets to take action in real time. The systems they built were quite bespoke. There really wasn’t a platform that publishers can take off the shelf to scale to their needs.
Game publishing and live operations have changed dramatically in the last 20 years. Now, multiplayer games launch and grow to tens of millions of players within weeks, and then the game has to figure out how to address billions of messages and make sure it’s a safe environment for all players. So, with those challenges in mind, we set out to build GGWP, which stands for “Good Game, Well Played.”