The Founding of Ex Populus
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I am very excited to announce my next venture, Ex Populus. Ex Populus is a game publishing company that is focused on partnering with the industry’s most talented creators next in line to create legendary games and content. I have a truly world class team co-founding this venture with me: Nik Adams, one of the original co-founders of ESL , Mark Harris, an Oscar nominated and Emmy award winning Pixar animator, Soby Saqib, one of the most prolific NFT collectors and yield farmers in the crypto industry, Clement Wong, 50x ICO investor and yield farmer and last but not least, Randall Nickerson joining me for the second time to lead technology development.
Over the last decade, we saw the rise of the mobile gaming industry. I was excited to have a small part in the growth and evolution of that industry, but things are changing. In mobile in particular, marketers’ access to user data is becoming more limited, which means success models will rely more-and-more on organic growth. This brings us back to Bill Gates’ 1996 essay that made internet history Content is King. As we move forward in the game industry, we will see that on all platforms, the highest quality games and content will rise to the top. Marketing will always have an important role to play, but for the foreseeable future success will primarily depend on excellence in creativity, design and product efficacy.
At Ex Populus, we anticipate a massive wall coming down in the game industry. To get access to the highest quality content in gaming, consumers have to spend hundreds of dollars on a console or thousands of dollars on a gaming PC. With cloud streaming technology beginning to proliferate across the various gaming platforms, that price barrier will fall. This means that some of the biggest franchises and games like Call of Duty, Assassins Creed and Fortnite will become available to an entirely new and massive audience that previously could not access those games or content. In short, mobile devices will continue to dominate the hardware market, but what was previously considered console or PC games will dominate the content arena on all devices thanks to the cloud.
What is even more promising right now is the growth and adoption of the Metaverse and NFT tech. The most ubiquitous example of a Metaverse used in the media is Ready Player One. In the book and the movie, all creative IPs are available to play and interact with in one core virtual environment. Think of this like Smash Bros but with near unlimited character choices and hundreds of games to play with those characters and a unified currency to commerce between characters and activities. In the market today, we see the early history of this new paradigm being built. What started with projects like Crypto Punks is being moved forward by new projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club, CoolCats, Wicked Craniums, SupDucks and plenty more. These new, original IPs will be a cast of characters playing and fighting with each other in the Decentralands of tomorrow.
Ex Populus will push forward, front-and-center in these new paradigms, the best content delivered on the cloud, open metaverses for players to engage and express themselves and interoperability with characters and currencies leveraging blockchain technology.
As a final note, the name Ex Populus is latin and means “from people” which is an intentional provocation to the popular phrase Ex Machina which means “from the machine”. Nobody knows what the future holds, but we promise that everything that comes from this company will be delivered with passion, quality and authenticity.
