It’s been over a year since Powder officially launched. Since then, our app has been downloaded 2.5m+ times, we raised $20m in funding and the gaming industry has become even riper with opportunities! While our app has naturally evolved in response to new trends and user needs, our key vision remained the same — to become the camera of the Metaverse.
Where will humanity be in the next 20 years? We believe that the frontiers between the real and the virtual will gradually disappear. Hundreds of games will reach the scale of Fortnite, Minecraft, or Roblox. Billions of users will showcase their life in virtual worlds, embodying avatars that merge with and enhance their ‘real’ identity.
The Metaverse is coming; and while we may not know what it will look (or feel!) like, it will certainly unlock entirely new ways of experiencing reality. In order for that to happen, we’ll need unprecedented infrastructure. Powder is one of many teams around the world already contributing to its creation.
In the last decade, the gaming industry witnessed tremendous demand for content, accompanied by a fascinating shift in creative power. As gaming universes became more customizable and social, players have moved from passive consumption to active creation of gaming content. Which makes perfect sense: games are rich, dynamic environments that people can inhabit and experiment with creatively. Despite this, gaming creators have faced a persistent problem: editing requires specialized equipment and software, which makes the whole process expensive, extremely time-consuming (based on our survey with 15k gamers, it takes ≈ 2h to produce a 1-min clip!) and difficult to master. We wanted to change that.
The idea for Powder came in December 2019 when the team enlisted the help of its Discord community to understand how gamers were creating video content.
“The community literally blew up and rapidly reached over 50,000 members,” says Stanislas Coppin, Powder’s co-founder and CEO. “When we realized how much people wanted to create, edit and share game clips, we knew we were onto something that could impact millions of players across all platforms.”
This is how we set out to build a one-stop-shop video platform for gaming creators. Our goal is to democratize content creation by giving the community easy-to-use tools for making the best quality clips and finding their audience. To deliver on this promise, our app offers three key functionalities: sourcing, editing, and sharing.
SOURCING
Knowing that it can take creators hours to process raw gameplay when producing clips, our priority was to help them streamline the process, saving them time for what matters the most — creative expression.
The first focus was therefore on sourcing. In addition to the built-in mobile recorder available on both iOS and Android, we are releasing the full version of a PC recorder, synchronized with the Powder app in a way that enables easy import of PC clips to mobile. For console players using Powder, direct sourcing of gaming clips from Xbox, PS4/5, and Switch is likewise available.
To help users gain efficiency when filtering out raw content, we then created a state-of-the-art AI detection technology that identifies gaming highlights based on peak moments in the game (i.e. a goal in FIFA or a kill in Fortnite) as well as emotional reactions of the streamers (e.g. screams, laughs, cries, etc.) from Twitch and YouTube Gaming. By adopting a broad definition of gaming highlights as spanning both game action and player’s response to it, we’re able to unlock a rich library of content, waiting for our users at the end of each game session to be edited and/or shared.
In a nutshell, Powder’s AI-driven and universal approach to sourcing allows you to extract the best quality game clips much faster, with little or no friction, across any platform and device. This makes the path from gamer to creator more seamless, transforming gamers that create UGC into brand ambassadors of the games they play.
To create great game clips with Powder, one simply needs to play video games!
EDITING & SHARING
Like other kinds of content shared on social media, gaming clips are a way for people to express and curate their virtual identities. We introduce a comprehensive toolkit to empower them creatively. Once imported into the app, videos can be personalized with the help of our dedicated editing engine –this is where the magic happens! It features 50+ effects and filters, trimming, zoom in/out, ‘shake effect’, freeze mode, slow motion, and can add music, GIFs, stickers, text, and even 3D elements.
In addition to serving as a means of self-expression, edited content becomes more attractive for all of us to watch, as the otherwise repetitive game-derived clips become transformed into creations in their own right appealing to larger audiences.
For creators to maximize their outreach and gain new followers, Powder provides easy ways to transform videos for wider sharing and distribution across social media. While the classical format of gaming is horizontal, more and more people engage with vertical content exclusively, which is a need we took into account. Our users can now share in a way that’s aligned with the native format of social platforms, i.e. horizontal for YouTube, vertical for TikTok, IG, YT Short, and so on.
And here we are today! It’s been an amazing journey so far — and we couldn’t be more thrilled for what’s coming next. Having recently been selected as Apple’s App of the Day in Europe and featured on the Microsoft Store, it feels that we’re entering a new phase filled with exciting collaborations, creative experiments, and breakthroughs.
Driven by the ultimate goal of becoming the video infrastructure of social gaming, we are committed to delivering the best in-app experience so that creating content around games becomes as easy (and fun!) for our users as playing them!
Originally published at https://blog.powder.gg on October 7, 2021.
