It is a Tuesday afternoon at 660 4th Street, and a small team of twenty-four is quietly dismantling the most clicked-and-forgotten page on the internet - the Steam landing page - and replacing it with something that talks back.
Game marketing used to look like a billboard, a press release, and a prayer. Forge thinks it should look like a quest log - one a player actually wants to finish. The company is building the layer between a studio's release date and the people who'll buy on day one, and it is doing so in a city that has spent the last decade pretending games were not a real category.
Forge's pitch is small enough to fit on a napkin. Most indie games launch into a vacuum. The Steam page is static. Wishlists arrive without context. A developer with a great game and no community is, statistically, a developer about to be invisible.
So Forge gives every studio - solo dev or AAA - a no-code site that runs quests, hands out rewards, captures emails, segments by verified gaming history, and turns clicks into a relationship. The product is unglamorous in the best way. It is plumbing for the part of game launches that has been pure folklore.
Illustrative coverage of marketing surfaces a Forge customer can consolidate. Source: Forge product pages.
If you tried to construct a more on-the-nose founding team for a games infrastructure startup, you would fail. Forge has the original esports champion, the man who built anime streaming into a billion-dollar exit, and a security infrastructure veteran. They worked together at GGWP. Forge spun out of it.
Co-founded Crunchyroll, ran it for over a decade through Sony's $1.175B acquisition. Earlier founded Frappr. Now back in operator mode.
Widely cited as the world's first professional gamer. Won John Carmack's Ferrari in a 1997 Quake tournament. Has built and sold gaming companies since.
Founded Cyence, a cyber-risk analytics company acquired by Guidewire. Brings the data and infrastructure DNA to Forge.
Forge is not selling a single feature - it is selling the case that the entire pre-launch-to-post-launch marketing surface should be one stack. You can read the product list like a confession of how splintered the alternative is.
The gamified hub. A quest-driven replacement for the static landing page, launched March 2025.
Verified-gamer playtest network. Recruit real players, gather structured feedback before launch day.
Points, leaderboards, multi-step missions. The mechanic that has driven 25M+ completions.
No-code landing pages with custom domains, web pixels, and a WYSIWYG editor.
Campaign ROAS, traffic attribution, and user-journey correlation in one dashboard.
Public API and Model Context Protocol server so studios can wire Forge into their own tools.
There is also Mentat AI - specialized agents that quietly run community drops, moderation flows, and engagement nudges.
The lead checks came from gaming specialists. The follow-on came from on-chain gaming protocols. The combination is the strategy - Forge wants to be the connective tissue regardless of how a player buys a game.
Spin up a custom-domain landing page in an afternoon. Add a quest that rewards players for wishlisting on Steam. Watch the analytics dashboard show you which traffic source converted. The Starter Pack is free.
Recruit a playtest cohort through Playtester.gg. Run multi-step quests during early access. Pipe verified player IDs into your own CRM via the Forge API.
Replace a scattered marketing stack - Discord ops, mailing list, web analytics, loyalty - with a single platform. Use Mentat AI to automate the moderation tail.
You probably already use Forge without knowing. The quests under your favorite game's "join the community" button are likely running on it.
Co-founder Dennis Fong won John Carmack's red Ferrari 328 in a 1997 Quake tournament. He still gives interviews about it.
Kun Gao's last company, Crunchyroll, was acquired by Sony for $1.175B. Forge is his second platform play.
Forge offers solo developers a free starter pack. The bigger studios pay. The economics are deliberately upside-down.
Back to the room where we opened. The twenty-four people inside it are still working. Outside, on screens around the world, the Steam landing page they grew up clicking on is being quietly mutated - one studio at a time - into something that asks the player to participate. A wishlist becomes a quest. An email signup becomes a reward. A static page becomes a place.
That is the small but unfashionable bet underneath Forge: that the most important real estate in games marketing is not the trailer, not the press release, not even the Twitch stream - it is the page in between, the one nobody was tending. Forge is tending it. So far the players are showing up.
Filed from San Francisco for YesPress. Subject: Forge.