Video Game, Media and Technology Veterans Launch GGWP to Combat Game Toxicity, Raise $12Million Seed Funding

BITKRAFT Ventures, with Makers Fund, Griffin Gaming Partners, Sony Innovation Fund, and Riot Games, Invest in AI-Powered Moderation Platform

GGWP, an AI-powered games and content moderation solution, founded by games entrepreneur Dennis Fong, Crunchyroll founder Kun Gao, and data and AI expert, Dr. George Ng, was introduced. The company has raised $12M from expert VCs, platforms, game companies and a world-class group of games entrepreneurs and executives, signaling industry-wide support to solve the massive problem of online toxicity in games. BITKRAFT Ventures led the seed round, with co-investors including Makers Fund, Griffin Gaming Partners (GGP), Sony Innovation Fund, Riot Games, as well as key industry figures such as Twitch founders Emmett Shear and Kevin Lin, founder of YouTube Steve Chen, Krafton CEO CH Kim, influencer and gamer personality Pokimane, and others.

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“22% of players have quit playing a game due to toxicity. With GGWP, we are modernizing game moderation. With the ability to respond at scale, we can dramatically improve game experiences, and in turn improve game businesses.”

GGWP, a nod to “Good Game, Well Played,” was created with the mission to democratize positive play using technology. Online games have a documented and massive problem: there are millions of toxicity-related complaints and reports across the biggest titles daily, making the task impossible to address and scale with human moderators alone. GGWP’s platform allows publishers to customize a moderation system that can catch, contextualize and respond to every single incident reported.

“There’s a lot of research that shows bad behavior is bad for business,” Dennis Fong, CEO, GGWP, said. “22% of players have quit playing a game due to toxicity. With GGWP, we are modernizing game moderation. With the ability to respond at scale, we can dramatically improve game experiences, and in turn improve game businesses.”

GGWP is a smart, AI-powered moderation platform that enables publishers to easily view a game’s aggregate community health, review incidents that occur with contextual information, and understand each players’ overall impact in the community. As simple as calling an API to get started, GGWP is remarkably easy for developers to use and integrate into their games.

GGWP’s player report management system aggregates, triages, and prioritizes player reports and provides context around incidents by displaying historical and holistic data on the players involved, including their reputation scores, credibility rating, and the severity of the incident.

GGWP’s models can automatically detect disruptive behavior like AFKing out of a match, griefing, intentional friendly fire, feeding, and speed hacking, as well as chat-based toxicity such as identity hate, incitement to self-harm, and criticizing gameplay. Its chat models also uniquely take a comprehensive and nuanced view of a chat incident by taking context and sentiment into account.

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“GGWP has an effective and easy to use platform powered by incredibly sophisticated technology,” Jens Hilgers, BITKRAFT Ventures, said. “The games industry desperately needs GGWP’s AI based moderation, and if you consider the fact that we all increasingly live online, social media and other online spaces will need solutions for toxicity in our digital societies.”

“Gaming has grown into an incredible force in entertainment, but it’s also become increasingly more difficult to address toxic behaviors that are often associated with many games today,” said Joseph Tou, Managing Director of Sony Ventures. “Gaming should be fun for all. We are thrilled to support GGWP and its innovative AI approach to both detect bad behavior in games and encourage positive gameplay.”

“Riot believes that gaming is for everybody and we’re passionate about fostering a community that is welcoming for all,” said Brendan Mulligan, Director of Corporate Development, Riot Games. “The team at GGWP truly shares that passion and we’re excited to see them provide powerful, scalable tools for sustaining healthy communities to our peers of all sizes across the industry.”

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