Session: Reddit Has Games: Build, Distribute, And Monetize On A Global Platform - Edgar Neto, Reddit

So, we're going to kick off our Next track which is our browser breakthroughs by sponsored by crazy games and our first talk of this track is the lovely Edgar for with Reddit has games build distribute and monetize on a global platform.
Good morning everyone.
Hi. How's everyone doing this morning?
Good. Yeah. All right. Or coffee hasn't kicked in yet, huh? Okay. Um well, thanks everyone for having me. I'm really happy to be up here uh talking

about Reddit, talking about community, and yeah, it's it's really great for me here because I feel like this is my community as well. Like I've been making games since I was 14 years old and like being part of a a community of people that are equally as passionate as I am to bring a little bit of fun, a little bit of joy for people every day. It's really nice to be here um and to be in front of you talking a little bit about Reddit and our platform. So um we got this question a lot uh over the past few months. Reddit has games and yes, Reddit has games. Uh, spent a lot of time talking to lots of developers yesterday at our booth and it's nice to see that people are welcoming to the idea of playing games on Reddit and publishing games on Reddit. So, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the opportunities of building and distributing your games on Reddit. Um, a brand new HTML 5 publishing platform. Um, first of all, let's start with what is Reddit? Well, Reddit is the place where people find their community. They find their niche interests. they find the people that have uh shared uh stories and challenges with them and they find their their friends and their communities there. Um

people around the world come together and unite on these niche communities and it is a platform where um lots of uh gamers and people talking about games are already there. So doesn't matter what type of game you build doesn't get doesn't matter what type of game you're working on. I'm sure there's a community for this type of game or for your specific game on Reddit. Uh we have 116 million daily active users and about 100k um active communities where people are every day talking about their best strategies. I'm particularly member of the Balders Gate 3 community lately and I'm always trying to find the best builds for my wizards. Um and there are like multiple communities where people are talking about the games every day. Um and yes, now you can build and publish your game directly on Reddit. You can build your HTML 5 game. It's going to be a part of the Reddit platform and be played directly from within a Reddit post. Um, here's a little breakdown of where you can see games on Reddit. First is your main

experience on Reddit, which is the Reddit home feed. You're scrolling past your home feed. You're going to see photos, you're going to see videos, you're going to see text posts, and now you're also going to be uh seeing games, posts that have games within them, and you just tap on them, and you start playing immediately. Uh there's also a unique exclusive games feed where you it's a a Reddit news feed where you're only going to see games being served by you and to you and you can see uh which games are more interest to you. And we recently launched oop I'm sorry we recently launched the community games drawer which is on the left side navigation of Reddit where you see all of your tools. There's going to be a uh uh featuring slot there where we can feature games and we can uh have recommended games there for you. This is front and center and it's getting um hundreds of thousands to millions of views every day. Uh and what is devit appropriately named David is the developer platform for Reddit which gives you all the tools to build, host and distribute your game on

Reddit. Um yeah, this is our developer platform. It's some of these are some of the examples of the games that have been built on the platform in the past. Uh it is brand new. We can say brand new because we've gone through many different iterations of this platform. The current iteration where it's a full stack web application that can be served within a Reddit post is actually quite recent. It's only a few months old and it's where we've seen the most growth of the platform. Um so what can you build? Um we've seen a lot of interest and from the community and a lot of growth uh in the past for Reddit games with daily games. Uh think about daily puzzle games um daily challenges. people seem to be really interested in coming back to Reddit every day to see these daily games. Uh bite-sized arcade games like action games where you can have like people uh challenging each other for uh um little little challenges here and there and mostly communitydriven. Like I said, Reddit is where you go to find your communities. And when you build a

community around the game, you're going to see and I'm going to show go deep into some examples here. People really build community around the game. they have like specific memes and specific languages around your specific game that you've built and and that's a behavior that really encourages us about the match between games and Reddit. Um you can build with tons of HTML 5 um uh libraries. We have some templates. I'm going to go deeper into detail uh that later. And here are some of the platform features that we have. Uh when you build with Devit and you host your game on Reddit, we are going to host the game for you. the back end and the compute are all hosted by us on Reddit's globally distributed infrastructure. So if your game goes viral, we don't have to worry about added costs to handle the and and handle traffic and um you know the all the challenges that come with a game going viral. We're going to be handling the compute for you. We're going to host your database. Uh it is crossplatform. So you build the game in HTML 5, it's going to work across Reddit's Android, iOS, and web uh

surfaces. And we're going to distribute your game. So, across all of the services that I've showed before, the sidebar, the games feed, and the home feed, your game is going to be found by players wherever they are. Um, sorry, there was a missed slide there. Um, so let me give some examples of u user generated content games. So, uh, this is one area that we see has a lot of success on on Reddit games because people are um creating their own experiences around the game. So, one of the the experiences I wanted to show is Honk. It's a game created by the user called you/ Johnny R. Uh, it's just like a twist on an old classic. Uh, we just tap to try to make the bird avoid some pipes. I'm going to avoid saying the name of the original game here. Um, but the thing is it's just a classic game. It's just a a tapping game. You tap and you have a bird and you avoid the pipes. But what this user decided to do is like

instead of me just creating these levels every day, how about I add a level creator to my game and let the players create their own levels and build a community around these levels. So this led to really unexpected growth. While the developer was creating one or two levels a day, once they added the level builder into their game, there was like hundreds, sometimes thousands of levels being created every day. Um, so they achieved a huge virality on Reddit by leaning into these uh community user user generated content. Uh, and it this um because people were creating more content, more posts and more comments around these user generated levels. This allowed them to uh reach even more variety because it was picked up by the content feed algorithms. Um, so by by then the developer had the effort to create the game. But this is uh this slide says 50% of the game created by the developer and 50% created by the community. Today I think it's more like 70 or 80% of the game is created by the

community. Uh and the community creates some really crazy delightful joyful experiences. Um so one of the examples is this one user. This is not a game developer, right? is just a user of Reddit that really likes Honk and he went into the level creator of Honk and he started creating these really crazy levels. Like none of his levels are normal. The first one you actually go backwards with your duck. Uh the second one you get to see what happens when you get swallowed by Kirby. And the third one you're actually fleeing a exploding planet because Frieza decided that he doesn't like your planet. By the way, there's no image upload uh feature on the level editor of Honk, but you can place blocks as obstacles or decoration. So, he was building these pictures block by block, pixel by pixel just to add some delightful, joyful experiences in his levels. And as you can see, his levels are completely crazy and out of the blue. So, one day he decided to create a level saying one normal level

just for a change. Just one normal level just today. And of course, when you click that level, you're actually stuck in a loop with Rick Ashley dancing to never going to give you up. And I think this like tricking people and pranking people into getting stuck with Rick Ashley dancing to never going to give you up is such a Reddity thing to do. I don't think there's anything more Reddity than that. And again, he created all of these frames from the music video block by block, pixel by pixel. And that's a player. That's not the game developer. is just someone who wanted to spend hours creating a delightful surprise pranky experience for the community. And I think that's something that's very unique to Reddit. It's the amount of time, the amount of care that people have to their community and how they want to create interesting content for the for the other players. Uh, Redonculus is another example. It's a riddle based game created by user Hammer Time Studio. Um, they also created a level creator which led to unexpected growth. Same story here. They were

creating one or two daily riddles a day. Once they added the idea that users could also create their own riddles and share. Now there's like hundreds of riddles being created every day. And he even created a um a browser for a hub riddle hub on his game where you can see the top riddle creators and browse all of the riddles and kind of like give back to the community the recognition of creating all of these riddles. And you can see on the picture to the right that there's people creating like hundreds of riddles. Um, and the community itself has hundreds, sometimes thousands of riddles created every day. Um, you can hear more from these developers in our developer blog. If you go to developers.reddit.com/blog, there are interviews with these developers and how they achieved growth and what they think about the platform, how they how they monetize their games and um about their whole experience developing from zero to uh viral growth on Reddit. Um, another really cool uh use case that we're seeing with Reddit games is daily puzzles. We're seeing a

lot that people like to create uh to play a challenging puzzle and know that there is a new puzzle waiting for them the next day. So, think about New York Times uh LinkedIn games. They want to have the next puzzle to challenge them and then challenge their friends to solve their puzzles to solve it faster than their friends and have their daily puzzle there uh waiting for them. So, Pocket Grids is another one that was released uh recently. It's mini uh daily crosswords and they really get uh a lot of benefit from the community from mixing these two use cases. They do have an official daily puzzle every day, but they also created a level creator. So, they get a lot of benefit from crossing these two um use cases and behaviors on Reddit that lead to a lot of growth. Um this is Silo, another example. This is actually a first party game by Reddit where we get to experiment with some of our newer features. Same thing uh daily puzzles developer or players have a daily puzzle waiting for them every day

and they get to challenge each other with creating their other the puzzles as well. And then we have quiz planet uh by Lum who's here with us. Um another game that enjoys the benefits of both of these things. There is a daily quiz expecting you uh waiting for you every day there and people can also create their quiz. that are specific to the communities that they're part of. Um, again, these behaviors, we can see that they lead to a lot of growth. And for daily puzzles specifically, we're seeing that this is uh generating a lot of uh behaviors that um are retentive and interesting for Reddit. So, this is something that Reddit is going to be building more towards. We want to make sure that if people are playing a daily puzzle, if you build a daily puzzle and people are interested in your game and they sign up for your game, we want to make sure that by the next time the puzzle, the next puzzle is ready that it's front and center for them that they see it and they can challenge their friends and then friends get notifications. So there's a lot more that we can explore that we will explore

in 2026 in this direction. Um so here's how um uh going back to the distribution how the games on Reddit are distributed. There's the normal Reddit feed uh which we're going to be serving uh games right together with the best content on Reddit. There's a dedicated games feed which can be triggered by the uh discover more games um section in the left left navigation. There are feature games on the left navigation as well. And there is a a subreddit called games on Reddit where the community is constantly posting the newest and and and hottest games that are coming out. Um, how do you monetize that? Well, the first thing is we want to invest in our community. We want to invest in people building great games. So, we have a creative fund for developers building games on Reddit. Uh, this creative fund is very game developer focused. So, it is as simple as if you publish your game, it's automatically enrolled into the developer funds. you just focus on

building a great game. If the game finds audience and it finds its users will just pay out directly to the developer proportional to the audience that the game has found. So it's very focused on you um just building the best game that you can and then being paid out for the by the audience that it it's found. It's paid directly to the developer and engagement is all you need. In our developer portal, you'll find a table saying uh what are the tiers of engagement that your game can unlock and how much you can get by each of these tiers of engagement. Um in last year, Reddit has paid over 100k thou 100k dollars $100,000 to developers. Now, I know this doesn't sound like a lot, but over the past three months, we've paid over half of this money. So, it's it has been like growing steadily, and we want to just keep um keep growing even further in 2026. Uh in addition to the developer funds, you can also monetize your game with inapp purchases. Uh here are some examples of games that have

inapp purchases enabled. Inapp purchases are able enabled via Reddit gold. So Reddit gold is the uh platformwide currency uh where people can use Reddit gold to give kudos to each other for like a nice post or a nice comment. Now you can use this Reddit wide currency to also buy in uh in-game currency or in-game items for your favorite games. Um, here are two examples from Sword and Supper and Farmer's Valley of their implementations for um, inapp purchases. And I wanted to use my last few minutes to invite you all to try it. If you're a game developer and you're curious about Devit, just give it a try. If you go to our developer portal, developers.reddit.com, you'll find templates to get your game started with your favorite gaming engine. We have templates for Unity, Game Maker, Phaser, 3JS, Go dot, and you can actually bring in whatever HTML 5 engine you're most familiar with. Um, so if you go to developers.redder.com/new, you get straight into the templates page where you can uh with one click start

developing your app. Uh, another invitation I would like to leave all of you is to join our hackathon. We have an ongoing game jam right now. It launched last Thursday and it's going to be going on for the next three weeks. Uh we're partnering with Game Maker for uh Hackathon for creating daily puzzles on Reddit. So there's up to $40,000 in prizes. That's in addition to the developer funds that I mentioned before where each game is eligible to up to $167,000 in eligible eligible u creator fund. This is in addition to that. If you win the hackathon, you're uh eligible to even more prizes. Try it out. Try building a debit game. try it with game makers so that you're eligible to even more prizes and after the hackathon you can still submit your game to publish to be eligible for the game creator fund. Um so I'll really like to leave this invitation to all of you and again say once more thank you for having me and we have a few minutes for questions if

we got enough time for like one question. Does anybody have a question? Hello. Um, thank you for the presentation. Really interesting. Um, how many games do you have uh right now on Reddit and uh which countries? Uh, where is the audience mainly?
Um, so how many games do we have right now on Reddit? We have a community with about 5,000 developers. Like I said, this is a fairly new uh developer platform. Uh, we have hundreds of games. I would say games that have crossed through the success barrier of earning the developer funds. I think it's probably in the low hundreds. So, it's still not a very competitive platform which presents a lot of opportunity especially with other platforms being super saturated with content. Um, and what was the other question? What's the main audience?
Yes. And for localization,
so the main audience for Reddit as a whole as a platform, it's uh it's in the

US. It is a global platform and it is growing uh growing outside and growing globally. The main plat the main audience is still right now in the US. Uh I would say localization is uh nice to have but not super important feature right now because the main the main audience is still in the US. So even these language games they are like finding like even if it's just in English it's still fine at the moment but it's going to change I think in the next few years as Reddit grows globally.
Brilliant. Thank you very much. Can I get a round of applause, please? Thank you.
Okay.