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Our Story

Video games are all about observing, learning, and improving in order to tackle a challenge. Each time a challenge is conquered, a new roadblock emerges to overcome. But when a player reaches the game's natural conclusion, it doesn't mean that's the end of their experience and discovery with the game. In fact, it may just be the beginning of their pursuit of even greater challenges within the game's framework.

The idea of incentivizing these challenges with a monetary award has been around for a long time, but has always faced significant issues of trust. Players needed to trust that the offer would actually be paid out when accomplished, and the sponsors needed to trust that the challenge was accomplished in earnest. Other issues such as payment types, communications, scale of incentive, and offer availability prevented many of these past offers from being paid out, much less seen by the larger fanbase for a given game.

Game Ventures was founded to address these issues. We aim to support the players and fans who can identify these significant gaming challenges, and to help transform them into contests for world-first achievements. We developed a centralized listing service, designed a crowdfunding award platform, introduced fair community-driven verification processes, and act as a trusted intermediary for award handling. Game Ventures develops and operates these features entirely ad-free, providing a smooth and clean user experience to best support community needs.

The worlds within video games present potential well beyond the confines of their story. Game Ventures aims to provide the place and means for game enthusiasts to connect with and incentivize intrepid explorers to push these games to new frontiers. Join, follow, or create a Venture and help push a game past the limits of today.

~Game Ventures Staff

Our Promises

We built Game Ventures to support the needs of gaming communities first and foremost - providing the ability to easily create, broadcast, grow, and track contests. We recognize that this involves significant trust, so we've made it our mission to provide service that respects our users, offers secure contribution options, and follows clear, straightforward rules. Though our team is small, we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure our platform offers exceptional value to all of our users.

Our Promises:

  • Completely ad-free browsing experience
  • User data is never shared or sold
  • Most user actions are publicly anonymous
  • Convenient, secure payments for crowdfunded awards
  • Reasonable fees and transparent pricing
  • Users have full control of their own contributions, including refunds
  • Responsible handling of funds on behalf of contributors and contest winners
  • Payouts supported to players around the world
  • Clear rules that allow for straightforward, flexible contests
  • Moderated content and submission reviews to assure quality
  • Community-based submission review process to assure fairness
  • Features that support the individual needs of fans, players, and specialists

Founders

Eric "Omnigamer" Koziel

Eric has been involved with competitive gaming for nearly 20 years, cutting his teeth on competitive Smash Bros. and finding his home in speedrunning. He became enamored with the optimization process, leading to dozens of world-class speedruns and becoming author of the hobby’s first full-scope book. Through these experiences, he realized that many gaming communities have few ways to reach out for wider attention and focus on their most significant challenges - which led to setting the groundwork for what would become Game Ventures.

Kristopher "Lavos" Cost

Kristopher is the lead developer and architech of Game Ventures. If something's broken, it's most likely his fault. He has been making websites personally and professionally since the early days of the Internet, specializing in building new and experimental projects. While not a speedunner himself, he has been a fan of games his whole life.