Our investment in Pixaera

Ask anyone who has grown up playing video games what their most profound memories are and certain game moments will likely make the cut. For me:

— Driving into Liberty City for the first time in Grand Theft Auto 3

— Playing out The Battle of Normandy in Call of Duty 2

— Riding into Mexico in Read Dead Redemption

— Exiting Vault 101 in Fallout 3

These moments largely defined my childhood. They immersed me to such an extent, that I vividly remember them to this day, as though I have just experienced them. Liberty City may be a fictional city, the Battle of Normandy may have taken place decades ago… but it sure feels like I have been to both. This is precisely what makes games so powerful — they teleport you. They make the unreal feel real.

When designed well, games are undeniably one of the most effective mediums for storytelling. They enable the player to actively partake in the narrative, and by doing so, retain so much of the experience… namely the emotions felt and the lessons learnt.

At their core, games are also incredibly well suited for teaching. Game designers have to ensure that players learn a game’s mechanics at the right pace in order to limit player frustration and churn. If a game is too hard, too soon, players will hit a wall and leave. If a game is too easy and does not get progressively more challenging, players will get bored. In many ways, this is no different to traditional education. You are unlikely to enjoy jumping into Calculus before tackling Algebra. The bottom line is that designing balanced progression experiences is mission critical to unlocking player engagement. This is a universal truth in the industry — one that is widespread and very well understood.

Tying the above together, it is hard not to see gaming as a deeply powerful medium for education. The immersiveness of play translates to high knowledge retention, while balanced progression mechanics mean high learner engagement. And yet, it feels to us as though the video game industry has largely neglected the education use case. Incumbent players are almost exclusively focused on entertainment… perhaps unsurprisingly though, given things seem to be going pretty well. In 2021, the games industry generated well over $200bn in sales, with recent forecasts indicating that the figure will most certainly surpass $300bn by 2026.

At LocalGlobe, however, we have long believed that gaming will extend far beyond entertainment and increasingly intersect with a growing list of verticals, from finance and fitness to social and yes, also education. This is not a particularly new view for us and dates back to our investments in Robinhood and Codecademy, both of which revolutionised their respective fields through gamification. Years since we made those investments, the opportunity feels more immediate than ever. Graphics have become life-like, while the cost of developing high-end, interactive experiences has fallen significantly thanks to game engines such as Unity and Unreal. One has to ask: why gamify an experience, when you can now build a full out AAA game around it? To us, this is where the world is heading.

The university cases studies of the near future will be experienced through simulations, not taught via text or lectures, while corporate training will be played out by workers, not learnt via antiquated videos. Games will undoubtedly democratise procedural learning. People will play for fun but they will also play to learn. Game studios will start serving enterprise customers, not just end-consumers. We will all learn by doing.

This is where Pixaera comes in, a company on a mission to make this very vision a reality. To put it simply, Pixaera is a game platform for the professional world, built on the premise that the future of corporate training should be engaging, empowering and fun. The company believes that immersive learning is the answer and should be the go-to way people learn most new skills.

For context, research indicates that immersive learning vastly outperforms traditional teaching methods by an order of magnitude. Average knowledge retention in a classroom after a week is 20%. Meanwhile, knowledge retention via experiential learning is 70–90%. Unfortunately though, scaling experiential teaching is incredibly hard today. Real-life training requires equipment, supervision, often large physical spaces and the need to travel. It is simply too expensive to deploy. Pixaera removes those barriers altogether, delivering high quality, cross-platform training experiences, at scale through play. It is a AAA gaming platform designed for enterprises, not a training product wrapped inside a game engine. Watch below to see what we mean: