To help with its bigger plans for game distribution and development, VoxPop Games has started an indie game fund and brought on former Rockstar VP Jeronimo Barrera to its advisory board.
VoxPop Games has made further strides in its goals to become a larger marketplace for game distribution and development, and is starting a fund for indie game development.
The company's new development fund will go towards games with "interesting concepts." Games made in partnership with the fund will be timed exclusives on the VoxPop platform. Established in 2018 and with a storefront currently in beta, VoxPop gives indie developers the ability to offer a share of their profits to those who recommend their games.
The end goal, according to co-founder and CEO Charles Yu, is for VoxPop to create an ecosystem where game developers and content creators are able to support each other. "VoxPop allows developers to use some of their future income to market themselves when they don’t necessarily have that money in their pocket at the start of the campaign," explained Yu.
"Every game you go on a page you see the exact percentage that developers are given. And you can see all the games they recommend, how much they stand to earn off of it, all of that stuff. And so consumers know what to trust.”
The announcement also comes with news that VoxPop has added former Rockstar VP of product development Jeronimo Barrera as chairman of its advisory board. Barrera joins existing board members Roger S. Sanford and Bennett Foddy.
"The entire VoxPop team have built a very impressive indie games platform in only a couple years," said Barrera to VentureBeat. "Their vision convinced me that there is an evolution happening that will bring in traditional and new business models that can help more developers, content creators and gamers interact in progressive and positive ways not available anywhere else."
Barrera worked at Rockstar for 20 years, during which he helped work on nearly every game released by the company before departing the studio in December 2018 shortly after the release of Red Dead Redemption II.
However in a Kotaku report published shortly after his departure, current and former Rockstar employees described Barrera as having a "volatile" personality, and said that new hires were warned to watch out for him. In that same report, Barrera was accused of groping a designer at the studio in 2014. He later denied the allegations and, according to the article, the resulting HR investigation led to no action against him.
Barrera is the second ex-Rockstar executive this year to be added to an advisory board; last week, co-founder Dan Houser joined the board for Web3 developer Revolving Games.
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