Typical Gamer Andre Rebelo Launches Super Studio Gaming Company JOGO With $2 Milli

 Posted on September 25, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1183 words  |  Trudie Dory

Andre Rebelo, better known as “Typical Gamer” to his millions of fans on “Fortnite” and YouTube, has launched gaming company JOGO, described as “super studio” that is set to investment more than $2 million into gaming development through Unreal Engine for “Fortnite.”

Rebelo will serve as CEO of the company, guiding the company’s direction, alongside Chad Mustard as the studio’s COO and Mark Price as CTO.

Over 15 years of gaming streaming on YouTube as Typical Gamer, Rebelo has racked up 23.7 million followers, an average of 105 million monthly views, and 8 billion lifetime views. He is one of “Fortnite’s” most recognizable and influential creators and has a specific focus on family-friendly content.

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Typical Gamer is currently ranked as the sixth top creator in Fortnite Creative, with an average daily count of 20,000 players across “Fortnite’s” top-10 most-played maps, including “Super Red vs. Blue,” “OnlyUp Time Travel” and his original content “Fortnut” and “Toy Bed Wars.” Collectively, Rebelo’s maps have recorded nearly 200 million plays from 44 million unique players

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But Rebelo’s longterm plan is to expand JOGO’s development beyond the maps of “Fornite.”

“We have been working covertly on this for about a year now. We’ve been putting together the best thing possible,” Rebelo told Variety. “We have 20-plus employees at this point. And we’ve been releasing some of the most popular games in ‘Fortnite,’ nearly 200 million plays with 50-plus million unique players, which is pretty insane. Those numbers are just wild to see. So the whole studio here at JOGO is made to make fun games. We want to make the most fun games in ‘Fortnite’ and also to expand beyond that to create our own IP that can live in movies and television shows and maybe other UGC platforms or as standalone games themselves. JOGO at its core is a gaming company that wants to make the best games possible.”

Rebelo’s team says it is looking to hire “very aggressively” from the AAA game developer talent pool at a time when larger gaming companies have made significant layoffs and shuttered studios. Typical Gamer will hire more than 20 more developers for a team of 35-40 at JOGO, which will include a content lab dedicated to experimenting with new elements, formats, and game mechanics, and an incubation program that will train developers in the new Verse programming language

“It’s really sad what’s happening in the industry from a catalyst of things that have been happening for many years — but it’s also a big opportunity for the future of gaming and what the players want,” Price said. “And it’s all about these experiences and these UGC platforms. We are now able to make games significantly faster; we’re talking about three months versus six years. My background comes from game engineering and I worked on ‘Call of Duty: Ghosts’ for a while, and normal game development sucks. It’s hard and you don’t get to see your work for many years, or sometimes the games get shut down. Now, a AAA developer can come into the space, like myself, and I don’t have to rebuild anything, I can just use the tools and make fun games. And it’s changed everything for both the players and for the developer. So this is a really amazing time to get into this space if you’re a developer, because this is where the players are and this is where the money is. We’re getting more players just with ‘Fornite’ than most games are getting that have spent $20 million in development, which blows my mind.”

COO Mustard points to the more than $320 million that Fortnite parent Epic Games paid out to “Fornite” creators in 2023 as proof of the profitability that is baked into JOGO at launch.

“The monetization is there currently, but we are looking to the future other platforms like Roblox, maybe ‘Grand Theft Auto 6,’ if they have a program there, to our own games on mobile or AAA or whatever,” Mustard said. “We have lots of opportunities to monetize that or even in doing partnerships with other brands. There are opportunities to monetize outside of just what ‘Fortnite’s’ creative system is, which is already very lucrative. But we have lots of plans to monetize on other platforms in the future.”

Watch the announcement video for the launch of JOGO below.

Hello world! #JOGO pic.twitter.com/pArTIyfBa5

— JOGO (@jogo) May 16, 2024

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