game-development-platform
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Two People, Thirty-Five Days, and a Very Different Game Studio
Series Entertainment began with an AI engine for professional game makers. Three years later, it is testing a bigger wager: that the studio, the store, and the audience can become one product.
Tianyin Zhang
Tianyin Zhang is the founder and CEO of DreamCraft Entertainment, a Redwood City-based startup building a code-free platform that lets anyone create, publish, and monetize video games without programming or art skills. A former Google engineer and game programmer, he co-founded DreamCraft in 2018 with Veronica Yao out of Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. The company has raised more than $15 million, including a $10 million Series A in November 2021 led by March Capital, with backing from Makers Fund, Tencent, and Hiro Capital. DreamCraft's mission is to make game creation roughly ten times easier and to open game development to hobbyists, modders, and first-time creators.
Roblox
Roblox is an online platform and game-creation system where users build, publish, and play 3D experiences made by other users. Rather than producing its own games, Roblox provides the engine (Roblox Studio), hosting, social layer, and a virtual currency (Robux) that lets a global community of creators turn ideas into playable worlds - and, increasingly, into income. With roughly 132 million daily active users and more than $1 billion paid out to creators in a single year, it has become one of the largest user-generated entertainment platforms in the world.