Far from the heart of Rennes, where a 24-year-old CEO launched RIVRS to ride the wave of User Generated Content (UGC) games, the company is now opening Vietnam and Hong Kong offices to launch a new business it believes has the potential to be many magnitudes larger by professionalizing the way such games are created and published.
Over the past several months, CEO and co-founder Romain Hubert has been bouncing around the Far East to lay the groundwork for this new phase. During a call from Indonesia just after the company made its big announcement at Gamescom Asia in Bangkok this week, Hubert explained that the move in Asia represents the beginning of a fundamental shift that will expand RIVRS beyond its roots as a game developer to a gaming platform, from creator to enabler for other developers to leverage its to rapidly build games on the Roblox platform.
In addition to the new offices, the company is starting a $1 million Creator Fund to attract partner developers to help them build and launch their own games. And the company has hired Aurélien Palasse, who has been a Ubisoft executive in Asia for almost 14 years, to be Managing Director Asia.
"We have a real opportunity to go fast, right now, with this new activity," Hubert said. "This is the moment to create something big, a big company."
Building Virtual Worlds
What began as a teenager's passion project in 2021 has morphed into one of Europe's most promising gaming companies, with 25 games, 1.5 million players, and over 20 million game visits.
"I started creating games on Minecraft when I was 16," Hubert recalled. "And we launched the company with the first few games that I did."
Hubert didn't go it alone. Enter Loïc Deffains, a 41-year-old serial entrepreneur with a track record of building successful ventures. Deffains previously founded Unitee, a startup studio based in Rennes that launched digital businesses with industrial partners. His background includes roles at Capgemini Consulting and as Deputy CEO of Yieloo.
Where Hubert brought gaming expertise, Deffains contributed operational wisdom and strategic vision. This partnership proved to be RIVRS's secret weapon.
Originally, the company's business model centered on creating high-quality UGC games with more professional production values, distinguishing itself from the predominantly young, unstructured individual creators who dominated these open platforms.
The company made games for such platforms as Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft.
The competition on these platforms can be fierce. But for those who succeed, they can be lucrative. For instance, Roblox reported it paid creators $923 million in 2024, while Fortnite paid creators $352 million last year. RIVRS once claimed it made €500,000 on just one of its games.
During this period, RIVRS learned to produce games across multiple UGC platforms simultaneously, from initial design through full distribution, completing games in an average of just two months. That speed enabled rapid iteration and market response. That vertical integration and cross-platform expertise represented a significant competitive advantage.
By 2024, RIVRS had developed 14 games across those platforms. It reported 20 million game visits and a community of more than 400,000 followers across Roblox and Discord.
That momentum helped RIVRS raise €4 million in funding in October 2024. The round was led by Pléiade Venture, with support from gaming influencers FuzeIII (5.4 million subscribers) and LeBouseuh (4.3 million subscribers).
Bigger UGC Numbers Game
The founders saw an opportunity to go further, faster. That required shifting their model in some important ways.
The first is a much larger bet on the Asian market. At the heart of that will be a new in-house development studio in Da Nang, Vietnam.
The new RIVRS Asia studio is positioned as an innovation hub built around AI-driven production pipelines that blend proprietary and existing technologies. The studio aims to create original content that reaches the global UGC top 100, strengthen data-driven live game management, and develop tools for the RIVRS developer community to speed up game creation.
In addition, the new regional headquarters in Hong Kong will analyze markets and trends and expand a community of more than 400,000 Roblox and Discord followers and 20 million cumulative visits across all RIVRS games.
Hubert said it has become clear that Roblox, in his view, is the most dynamic UGC platform with 380 monthly users. In addition, he dynamics of Asian markets and game play are particularly well suited to these types of games. Indonesian players rank second globally on Roblox, while Vietnam boasts one of the most active gaming communities in the world. They have a cultural fit with the platform," Hubert said. "It is really easy for them to understand Roblox."
A New Partner Model
This is not just a new focus on Asia. With the $1 million Creator Fund, RIVRS is announcing that a major goal of these efforts is to partner with other developers to help them bring their games rapidly onto Roblox by leveraging RIVRS's tools and expertise.
Hubert explained that the company will provide tech assets such as game templates so even developers with little or no experience can start to create games. They help with the ideation, the marketing, the launch, the data, and all other possible components, he said.
RIVRS finances 50% of the development costs and then splits the revenue 50-50. Partners must make a new game every month, Hubert said, because speed is key in these markets.
"It's a real short time to develop games," he said. "Because it's all about volume. We are not looking to have the best game. We are looking to learn about the platform. If you want to learn, you need to fail. So the idea with this new system is to be able to launch 10, 20, 30 games every month. So, to have a big volume. To test a lot of systems, a lot of features, gameplays. The final goal is to get a game on the top 10. If we are able to have one game on the top 10, we can make around 100k to 500k dollars a day."
RIVRS claims to be already profitable with their publishing activities, and so is funding this new phase with the money previously raised plus cash generated from current business, Hubert said.
Beyond leveraging RIVRS's existing knowledge, the company is looking to further develop its AI capabilities to further accelerate game development and learning. Indeed, the Da Nang studio is designed as an AI-powered innovation hub.
"We are working on AI to create a bunch of new tools that they will be able to use during development," Hubert said. "Right now, we are working on a tool that will help them to generate a 3D-model directly in Roblox."
While Asia is the new initial target market, Hubert envisions this eventually as a global business. For example, South America is also a big region for Roblox, he noted.
But the main goal, for now, is to prove the new model. There are a lot of individual creators on platforms like Roblox. There have been attempts to professionalize the production of these games, but Hubert said that so far, no one has broken through and really unlocked the key to scaling such a model.
He believes RIVRS has found the right mix of tools and incentives, plus its own know-how as a UGC studio, to seize what he sees as a massive opportunity.
"You have a lot of competitors," he said. "We've seen a lot of new companies want to launch professional activity on Roblox. But they don't have the capacity, the money to invest and scale like we are doing."
