Forge, the platform for community-driven game marketing and engagement, today announced Forge Direct, a kind of self-service gamified hub that allows game developers to launch fully customizable, feature-rich community portals.

Unlike traditional game websites which typically serve as static landing pages, Forge Direct is aninteractive engagement platform complete with quests, loyalty rewards, and direct-to-player commerce that developers can host on their own domain to complement—or even replace—a traditional web presence. So far, players have completed 25 million quests with Forge.

“It’s been extremely successful so far, and we basically got to a point where, around late last year, in order to scale up with the demand that we’re seeing from games, we’ve essentially made our tools self serve,” said Kun Gao, CEO of Forge, in an interview with GamesBeat. “This is a continuation of everything we’ve been building so far. The games can themselves, manage their experiences, so that they can now put them” on their own websites rather than just on Forge.gg.

Disrupting the way things are done

For years, game developers have relied solely on platform-driven discovery through storefronts like Steam, iOS, and Google Play, where visibility is controlled by algorithms and revenue is limited with high platform fees. Forg...