Written in Partnership with Amir BakianThe gaming market was estimated to have produced between $189 billion and $220 billion in 2022, almost double what the entire film industry makes. But despite its economic success, the gaming community has maintained a relatively low profile. Professional gamers stick to their devoted niches and local friend groups stick to their hyper-isolated gamer pods for years, and sometimes even decades, without branching out. The result is an immersive yet isolating industry that keeps gamers largely satisfied yet separated.
But a new change-maker seeks to unite the gaming community with never-before-seen data and a revolutionary idea. Los-Angeles-based global gaming innovator POGR condenses all a player’s game and social media data into a single platform, frontlining unprecedented statistics and access. The result, the organization hopes, will be a fundamental restructuring of the way gamers and developers connect, collect, and grow.
POGR started as an idea between founders Connor Ellison, Randolph Aarseth, and Juno Kim. Connor met Randolph over gaming communication platform Discord and was surprised to learn they both lived in LA. They quickly connected in-person and established their goal: to build a product that connected gamers, developers, and the larger gaming community. Soon, their dream became POGR, the ultimate gamer network.
POGR solves what once seemed unsolvable, giving gamers a chance to connect, compare with friends, and discover the gaming world through one centralized service. It verifies users through their ‘identifi’ process, which protects gamertags and limits impersonation. Additionally, POGR flips the script on competitive play, allowing gamers to engage with local and national gaming communities and challenge their opponents in duels. As gamers hone their skills, they’ll prepare for the World League, POGR’s fully autonomous global tournament system. Between casual gaming groups, competitive gaming groups, and everything in-between, POGR unites a bevy of communities across the globe, streamlining inclusion and connecting players.
The team has already made a huge local impact and earned recognition as one of the top 10 in the LA Techweek Hackathon by applying their analytics engine to help homelessness in Los Angeles. Although there were doubters all along the way who denied gaming’s impact on local communities as well as the integrity of a metaverse analytics organization, Connor didn’t pay them much attention.
“The journey is the destination in disguise,” he says. He adds that when building his organization, he had to enjoy the little things despite the personal opposition and financial difficulties that came his way. “The secret,” he explains, “was in genuinely enjoying what I was doing and who I was doing it with.”
Financial solutions are finally arriving: recently, POGR was recognized by Venturerock and awarded $2.25 million in seed funding. But the hard work has just begun. The team is set to raise series A towards the end of 2023, and in the meantime, there’s a sea of gamers to unite. Currently, the team is actively researching and working with indie game development companies who need resources to create their projects and bring together their player bases. There are even some indie games launching through the player profile network, including survival thriller Last of Humanity. Downloading the game will give players early access to the player profile system.
The POGR Player Profile is revolutionizing how gamers and creators come together. In the long term, Connor and the team’s goal is for POGR to become one of the pillars of the metaverse through its harnessing of high powered data analytics. With the gaming community mobilizing behind them, they seem well on their way.
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