The Secret Sauce is The Team

Our co-founder's - Ramin Shokrizade’s - experience with game economies started in 1999 with Everquest, where he made enough money selling digital assets to other players to make professional gaming his full time job. In early 2000 he went to the Los Angeles Times and teamed up with Ashley Dunn to write the first mainstream article on virtual goods sales. He began assisting developers world-wide with their virtual economies, with his study of “gold” (World of Warcraft, 2004) and “ISK” (EVE Online, 2003) degradation inspiring him to find solutions that would allow for sustainable player to player game economies.

The result of these first 10 years developing virtual economics was Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models (proprietary 2009) and Third Tier of Game Development (2010) that predicted and explained the path forward to a future metaverse and associated token-based authentication system that would make it possible. Over 100 papers were published on the subjects of game economics, monetisation, and game ethics culminating in an analysis of the biological needs met by social gameplay (The Physiology of Gaming, 2018).

On the development side, you can see the progression of Shokrizade’s designs from Project Spark (Microsoft, 2013, MS’s first internally produced free to play game), World of Tanks Blitz (Wargaming, 2014, over $1B in worldwide revenues), and World of Warships (Wargaming, 2014, over $1B in worldwide revenues), to his first web3 game: Gods Unchained (Immutable 2019, arguably the most successful free to play web3 game to date).

To handle the production of a series of new web3 products merging the best of web2 with Shokrizade’s proprietary game economics and Tokenomics systems, the team has recruited and reassembled 4 of the founders that created the first Call of Duty games for console: led by Craig Allen, Craig McPherson, Dave Prout and Steve Skelton. Call of Duty is the most successful web2 game franchise of all time, and the original Spark Unlimited team is thrilled to be working towards the goal of bridging web2 and web3 gaming. The studio also has added leadership talent from Epic Games, EA, Sega, Kabam, Wargaming and Zynga—team members who have collectively shipped over 100 games -- including 3 titles grossing over $1 Billion and enjoyed by over 100 Million players.

Find more details about our full game economy in our StarGarden white paper.