Founders Yaprak and David DeCarmine
Today we are thrilled to announce our investment in Game Jolt – a community platform for Gen-Z gamers and creators.
We first met CEO, Yaprak DeCarmine, back in 2019 and were immediately struck by her clarity of vision. Quickly, we began to realize that the combination of David and Yaprak was a special and complementary partnership and we have continually been impressed with their unique ability to execute behind that vision.
Game Jolt enables gamers to have a place to gather to discuss games and share their new creations. Organically, this became an active gathering spot with millions of people engaged each month – the desire for an uncluttered, pure game environment was clearly needed. The platform has flourished through enabling fans and indie developers to release FanGames and interactions with existing popular games.
There are ~3 billion gamers worldwide across a host of different platforms, and an increasingly strong representation from Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha. As these generations flourish online, they are both exceptionally active and remarkably thoughtful about creating a sense of community.
Today’s gamer experience lacks the support for that community ethos. In-game chats happen on Discord, off-game discussions on Reddit. Gaming creators are followed on Twitch, YouTube and to some degree, Patreon, and still more content is shared across social networks. Individual games have traditional online community forums that are plagues by support requests. To top it off, none of these platforms cater to younger generations.
Game Jolt brings these processes onto one game-agnostic social platform online and through mobile devices. Today, the platform supports over 40,000 games, across user created games, well-known games like Minecraft and League of Legends, and novice and indie developed-games. Over time, the platform has evolved into a social community for over 3m monthly users, a place for indie gamers to launch and distribute their games, and a popular game jam and FanGame platform.
As investors in RecRoom, we’ve learned firsthand that Gen-Z is creating community and generating content wherever they go – and Game Jolt is the platform built for them. As platforms like TikTok emerge as the standard of personalized discovery, we believe Game Jolt sits on a tremendous opportunity to capture, surface and distribute gaming content in the community.
We are so excited to invest in this small and mighty team here in Seattle alongside our friends at Acequia Capital, and a set of incredibly valuable angel investors from the likes of Twitch and Rec Room.
David DeCarmine started this company when he was 14, so it isn’t quite Day 1 – but we are certainly excited to partner for the long run!
Related Insights
