Rival Peak interactive reality show hits 22 million views

The interactive game-like reality show Rival peak became a hit on Facebook, with over 22 million views of the first six episodes.

Creation of Genvid Technologies and Pipeworks Studios Rival peak, a new kind of interactive experience that is part a game and part a reality show. The audience is made up of real people, but the characters they watch are not. And from today, the show will also be available on iPhone in addition to Android and PC.

The near-reality show stars 12 AI characters who take part in a Survivor-like a competition taking place in a bustling Pacific Northwest. The live audience can influence the outcome by focusing on the tasks and helping their favorite characters. The show runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and its host is Will Wheaton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Table top board game on YouTube). He runs the weekly recap show that summarizes the events of each week.

In a previous interview with GamesBeat, Genvid CEO Jacob Navok (one of our speakers at our upcoming Metaverse event) said the concepts and vision behind the game have been in the works for a decade, first in its startup Shinra Technologies and more recently at Genvid. Rival peak is a show that is only available through cloud gaming and streaming technologies, he said. But the execution of the whole project took place mainly in the last six months.

Pipeworks CEO Lindsay Gupton said in an interview with GamesBeat that he has been discussing the idea with Navok for three years. No other company had the technology to do something like this, Gupton said. Pipeworks made an interactive stream on Twitch where the public could vote on the results about five years ago. But Rival Peak tapped into the idea of ​​engaging audiences more broadly.

“We think we’ve helped invent or come across a new medium,” Gupton said.

22 million views are for the weekly closing show Rival speaks. Episode 5 alone has over 6.5 million views. the Rival peak The ‘instant play’ live broadcasts saw over 600,000 unique viewers interact with AI ‘competitors’ and their surroundings, with a maximum concurrent usage of over 46,000 viewers. Humans decide what kind of environment applicants will find themselves in.

Gupton said the idea was to get the audience to behave like some sort of god, helping through a collective vote to get the characters to behave. There was also a lot of inspiration from Survivor, Lost, The Hunger Games, and The Sims, Gupton said.

“It’s looking at the tropes in all these things, where the public is in the game as in Survivor, but there is a story like in Lost, “he said.” You almost have to teach the audience what it is. “

Expert streamers can help hold the audience’s hand, Gupton said.

“The public must realize that they have a real agency,” he said. “Fans come together and create their own audience stories of what might happen. It was all a great experience.

In total, Facebook users consumed more than 25 million minutes of the Rival peak franchise. The show is most popular in India, Mexico, Brazil and the United States. Users have generated over 400 million points to save characters from elimination.

Navok calls the game the very first “MILE” or “Massive Interactive Live Event” where millions of people can control the direction of the story.

A group of “puzzlers” in the audience solved puzzles that helped the castaways cross the map, but a sudden earthquake blocked half the cast. As they ran through the haunted woods for survival, they discovered a secret bunker, before being forced into a post-apocalyptic wasteland by a mudslide, Navok said. Fans have reconstituted that the mysterious Tangram Labs, the so-called “sponsors” of Rival peak, could have sinister motives.

Pipeworks has been around for 21 years, working on jobs for Wizards of the Coast and games like Terraria. Pipeworks has 150 employees and was acquired in October by Sumo Group for $ 100 million. Dan White and Dan Duncalf founded the company and Gupton joined it 14 years ago.