Announcing Metatheory Inc. and Duskbreakers

Greetings Friends,

Nearly a year has gone by since I left Twitch. After months of reflection and learning, family and friend time, exploring Taipei, video games, and way too much Youtube, I’m excited to be back in action working with friends old and new. This time off allowed me to finally wrap my mind around the world of blockchain, and I have been reenergized by its potential for the future. I am excited to build again, and with our new company, Metatheory, we believe that Web3 is a path forward.

I grew up in a world where the internet was something new and strange and completely remarkable. This wasn’t the age of massive social networking apps and walled gardens, but instead a chaotic mesh of bulletin boards, chat rooms, ICQ, seemingly infinite content, and wacky personal projects. As time passed, the internet began to change, bit by bit. The big players settled in, and eventually much of the open, creative mayhem was crowded out by large systems designed ultimately to addict us. But there’s change in the air. There is now another strange and wonderful yet misunderstood corner of the internet available to explore, and suddenly I’m whisked back to more innocent musings. This is an opportunity for society to discover and embrace a new paradigm in control, access, and participation.

I’ve dreamed of building worlds and games my whole life. Joining me is an incredible team of artists, writers, producers, game makers, engineers, and seasoned operators. We believe in blockchain’s promise of more equitable and distributed ownership and influence. We believe that this can shape a better internet and thus a better society, and we hope to be one such positive conduit for people to better understand Web3’s potential. Crypto can change lives, and the stories we hear remind us of stories we’ve heard before from Twitch creators — stories about their liberation from unfulfilling jobs and building satisfying careers around their passions. This is the fuel that energizes us all in working towards generating a greater, more constructive impact on the world.

In selecting our first adventure into the frontier, we ultimately settled on video games as our creative canvas with an emphasis on storytelling and worldbuilding. Games have been at the forefront and in the background of our entire lives. Games have shaped the way that we relate to each other and the communities that we live in. Games have broken borders, broadened our worldviews, and given us common ground to stand on. As a team, we are so excited to combine our talents to create exciting new franchises — building worlds and developing video games, animated shows, comics, and more. We’re over the moon that we get to create across mediums that we enjoy so much. We have multiple game franchises in development, and with our first endeavor, Duskbreakers, our goal is to have you join us in co-creating a brand new sci-fi space saga.

Duskbreakers exists in a timeline not so far in the future. A mysterious solar event has plunged the Earth into darkness. Still reeling from decades of conflict over diminishing resources, the nations of the world struggle to restore power and reestablish control. As an uneasy peace returns to the planet, a massive unidentified object is detected in geosynchronous orbit. This object is discovered to be a colossal derelict alien spacecraft dubbed The Dusk, and upon closer examination it is determined that the hull is composed of exotic meta-materials and alien technology that have world-changing implications. A giant corporation anointed by the world’s most powerful countries is authorized to regulate and manage these resources to revolutionize the world for our people, but at what cost? The Dusk and the Breakers — workers that leave their families, endure permanent changes to their bodies, and risk their lives in hopes of a better tomorrow — are at the center of our story. More on Duskbreakers and other exciting worlds in future posts. You can follow the project at twitter.com/duskbreakers, join the discord community at discord.gg/duskbreakers, and check out our website at duskbreakers.gg.

At Twitch, we built towards a future that empowered creators to fundamentally change the way they work and contribute to their communities. With our creators and industry partners, we worked hard to elevate gaming culture, to reshape its role from being stigmatized and dismissed as a shameful hobby and thrust it to the forefront of culture and entertainment. The next natural step is to lean into games and further shift the paradigm — to lead with fun and entertainment in learning how to create and exist in new systems that are fair, equitable, and controlled by the user. We will leverage all that we learned at Twitch to continue building tools and platforms that empower people to thrive while doing what they love. We are starting in games, but we have many machinations on how Web3 can generally provide a better connective tissue that grants users and creators more control and opportunities. We hope that as we build, we can leave the internet in a better place than we found it.

We’ll see you in the metaverse.

Kevin and the Metatheory team