[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is generally (but not today!) written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
GDCo is on a short summer break – returning Friday, fear ye not. So thanks to The Writer Will Do Something and Eliza co-creator Matthew Seiji Burns for once again providing a special guest post while we’re out, laying out an important new market.
It’s our 4th summer GDCollab with Matthew, after finding out ‘what generative AI could do for Pac-Man’ (2024) & chats to Pickle Fighters dev Chad Blastovic (2022), and mysterious entity ‘Greg Paul Thomas’ (2023). Please check those out, if you haven’t – and see if you learn something from this one!
These days it’s increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the trending games and online services out there. So it would be forgivable if you hadn’t heard of PugLips. This soaring UGC platform-slash-metaverse-slash-friendslop experience had over fifty million active users in July. Wow! Clearly you should be jumping on this right now… but how?
No need to worry about being behind the curve. We’ve put together this explainer to bring you up to speed.
At its core, PugLips is an online world consisting of several different parts: Crabspace, a hybrid polygon/voxel based online game and experience building toolset, and WormSpace (note the use of camel case for this one – getting it wrong will get you mocked incessantly), a similar toolset that is still somewhat distinct from the former.
There’s also Bootleg, a multimedia content management system, and a semi-deprecated Web3 NFT trading marketplace called Jersey Club Remix. There are many others, but these are the main ones.
Players control avatars known as “Puglings,” which start as cubes with unwieldy physics-based controls, making it difficult to interact unless you pony up PugBux (more on that later) to reduce the size of your avatar’s collision sphere. Puglings can create and visit each others’ Crabspaces to interact and play games.
The most popular games center around coin flips, with Sequential Coin Flipper, Do Da Coin Flip, and Flippus Coinus The IIIrd being the most popular, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players around the world who compete to achieve exact statistical accuracy – that is, 50% heads and 50% tails.
The other popular activity in Crabspace is complaining about WormSpace, which is sometimes seen as a rival service, even though the two are both part of PugLips and are more or less the same thing. It would take up too much time to go into the long history of the relationship between these two toolsets.
But to distinguish them briefly, WormSpace tends to have activities that focus more on lore and timeline creation. In fact, the WormSpace Fandom page has over 100,000 entries, rivaling Finnish Wikipedia in scope and size. Of course, none of that would be possible without the backbone of what makes PugLips so special: the culture.
Even if you don’t know what they’re referring to, surely you’ve seen the memes: “unpermabanned from piano stairs,” or maybe that video of the glitchy low-poly avatar rotating backwards in a pool of lava as someone yells “hot dogs” repeatedly off camera.
As hilarious as they are, memes are also a form of social currency that can make or break a Pugling’s “Reputatio” score. Sharing the wrong meme at the wrong time can be punished in various ways, with a cavalcade of Say Nay Votes, or even a stint in 4D Prison.
Does that sound somewhat impenetrable and unwelcoming? It can be, especially if you’re expecting the open arms and friendly greetings you would get in older online games such as Call of Duty or League of Legends. It’s important to keep in mind that for the target demographic, behavior like this is accepted as normal. In fact, PugLips’ sole developer, a 19-year old who goes by the name LippyLupperson, has officially stated he doesn’t see a problem! So, you’d better get used to it.
There are multiple currencies to be aware of in PugLips. The first is PugBux, which you can earn by completing Big Challenges, selling items on Jersey Club Remix, or by opening YeetCrates.
PugBux can also be converted into Knobs and Snackin’ Beans (but be aware that Snackin’ Beans cannot be converted back into PugBux, and Knobs cannot be converted to Snackin’ Beans unless you have over 3.16 x 107 Reputatio and are in “Good Standing” or better with the Bulb of Restitution).
Real money is also accepted, of course, primarily in the form of futures and options on YeetyCrates, which are traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (yes, the real one). Anyone making content for PugLips should think carefully about how to integrate liquid complex derivatives based on their in-game assets.
It may sound obtuse at first, but YeetyCrates trading is serious business, and has minted dozens of 12- and 13-year old millionaires over PugBux’ six months of operational existence.
We’ve summed up most of the key concepts you’ll want to know before you check out PugLips for yourself, but here are a few more terms to know before you engage:
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Zone Barn: The Zone Barn is a barn in the Barn Zone that became a popular spot for barn-related activities. When Puglings say “let’s get to the Zone Barn,” they are referring to this barn.
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Pointsack: A large number of points. Originally coined when infamous PugLips streamer ElephantBabby commented, “now we got a whole sack of points,” causing a 30-minute meltdown in the chat.
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Jazz: A genre of popular music originating in the United States in the 1900s, characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensembles, and free improvisation.
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Clout Orb: Contrary to what it sounds like, a Clout Orb is not an Orb that follows you around and gives you Clout. Don’t learn this the hard way.
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Helperclown: This term originally referred to a well-liked NPC in a specific Crabspace about coin flipping that would help you flip coins, but now this friendly appellation is applied to any clown that is helpful.
As we all know, the market for games has changed dramatically over the last few years, with top earners continuing to take revenue and mindshare away from previously safe middle-tier products.
With funding still dry and an uncertain future on everyone’s minds, this is no time to be precious about quality, design, fun, safety, ethics, platform control, or international law. It’s time to get over yourself and start creating content inside PugLips. Crabspace is waiting.
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks. And no, this article isn’t real – are you crazy? Happy summer!]
