Galactic Group announces the creation of a new web3 gaming publishing division. With video games seeing increasing popularity among consumers in the UAE, the industry is poised to witness a steady annual growth rate of 5.40% through 2027 with an estimated market volume of $492.90 million; Galactic Entertainment Publishing, founded by industry visionary Loren Roosendaal and backed by a team of world-class talent from the games and movie industries, including Co-Founder Mark Meyers, former Head of Disney’s AAA Studios, is looking to redefine the gaming landscape with their launch as one of the world’s first play-to-own publishers.

Building with the community: Rather than setting out to build a franchise in a vacuum and throw it at the market when it’s done, Galactic has been taking a different approach. In fact, many members of its executive team hail from Galactic Entertainment Studios, the creators of the PlanetQuest franchise, a daring experiment that saw them bring together over 250,000 fans who, over the past two years co-created the storyline and lore of the Star Wars like franchise, which culminated in a soon to be released trilogy of books, comics and a game that’s due for early access later this year.

“Naturally no first attempt at something new is perfect, but it’s been amazing getting to create a sci-fi universe with the fans in a way that’s never been attempted before. I’ve gotten to fulfill a lot of my childhood dreams, working on Star Wars, Blade Runner and Marvel movies to name a few, but there’s little that compares to being able to interact and build with the fans from day one,” comments Chief Creative Officer Jon McCoy.

The currently dominant Free-to-Play model is starting to show cracks. Tens of billions of dollars are being spent on ads each year to acquire new players, driving up publishing costs, which just end up being charged back to the players as more and more expensive in-game purchases and making it harder for developers to earn a living.

“Involving the community early on and rewarding them for their participation with in-game goods that they actually own benefits publishers, developers and players, by reducing publisher ad spend, providing the feedback developers need and getting the players better games,” says Co-Founder Mark Meyers of Disney fame.

Innovative Play-to-Own model: Key to this new approach is the play-to-own model, which opens up the economy of entertainment franchises, through the use of blockchain technology, allowing fans and players to own and trade anything from in-game items to entire planets, along with the franchise’s own currency. This provides the opportunity for early adopters to own a piece of an entertainment universe they love and does away with situations where players who want to trade are left to rely on the black market and even risk having their accounts banned and everything they played for years to obtain taken away from them in an instant.

“It deserves to be said that we believe the current free-to-play model is broken. It’s crazy to think that players are spending over $100 billion dollars and 100’s of hours of their spare time each year, gathering in-game items they don’t actually own. Let alone that when someone tries to sell any of these, we, at best, give them a chance to do so for store credit and at worst chase them down with the ban-hammer.” adds Group Founder & Chairman Loren Roosendaal.

With PlanetQuest, the publisher’s first franchise having just launched a major airdrop campaign allowing fans to start accruing in-game currency, soon to be followed by a line-up of titles across various media, Galactic already has a jam-packed year ahead of it as a publisher. However that may just be the beginning, as it recently secured the rights to build out a similar play-to-own gaming universe for an undisclosed billion-dollar Hollywood movie franchise.

With the global blockchain gaming market expanding at a compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 24.6% from 2021 to 2027 and the number of blockchain gamers is expected to cross 2.7 billion, the UAE increasingly adopting this technology across various sectors, Galactic Entertainment’s efforts are timely. One thing is for sure, with games continuing to grow and cross over with other forms of entertainment and community participation being a more and more important factor Galactic is set to make waves and might just trigger the next gaming revolution.