Orio CEO Volha Paulovich on the rise of UGC and player creativity

• PG Connects Nordics takes place in Helsinki on October 20th and 21st.
• Paulovich will discuss player creativity and UGC on the “Beyond Roblox” panel.
• She argues that player creation is becoming a central part of games rather than a side feature.

The games industry will gather in Helsinki for Pocket Gamer Connects Nordics on October 20th and 21st, with more than 150 speakers exploring the latest developments in games.

Among them will be Volha Paulovich, CEO and co-founder of Orio, which enables players to create new content inside the games they already play, with studios deciding what goes live.

Paulovich will join the "Beyond Roblox" UGC panel at the event.

PocketGamer.biz: Please give us a summary of what you’re speaking about and why it’s important.

Volha Paulovich: On the UGC panel "Beyond Roblox" I'll be talking about who owns player creativity - and why most studios choose to give it away. Today most players who want to make something have two choices: a creation platform that owns everything they build, or a mod scene their favourite game tolerates.

That leaves studios choosing between handing their audience to someone else (barely a choice, but has to be mentioned) or spending time, efforts and budgets on building tools of their own and moderation. There's a third option, and this is the year it stops being theoretical.

What’s the most common mistake you see being made in the games sector?

Treating player creativity as something that happens to you. Studios find out what their community built when it goes viral, then react: takedowns, 'disable your mods before reporting bugs', updates that break what players made. But players are not passive, and every studio knows how loud they get when they're unhappy.

A review bomb is passion with nowhere to go. The player writing two thousand words on Reddit about how your boss fight should work is already designing. Give them the right tool and they're one step from shipping it.

If you could give other mobile games companies one piece of advice, what would it be?

Protect the canon, open the edges. Your game's real value is the shared experience: the boss everyone fought, the ending everyone argues about, the meta everyone knows. That should never be up for grabs. The edges should be wide open - new levels, maps, challenges, twists.

Decide up front what players can change and what they can't, and you never have to choose between control and creativity. Roblox is all edges and no centre. Your game shouldn't be.

Where are the next big opportunities in the mobile games market?

The money studios are leaving on the table. Games that let players create show more players and more revenue years after launch, and sell more DLC. Yet four in five successful PC games offer no official way to create anything, and on console it's almost all of them.

Meanwhile, more than $2 billion a year is paid to creators, most of it through two platforms. That isn't a niche. It's an economy most studios have opted out of, mostly because they couldn't see a safe way in.

What do you think the next big disruptor in mobile games will be?

Until recently, making something inside a game meant learning tools most players never would. Creation in general was the hard part, available to a few.

Today these barriers are being dismantled fast. And a whole generation raised on Roblox and Minecraft already treats creating as part of playing. They don't see it as an option. They expect it. A game that only lets them play is starting to feel too limited and somewhat unfinished.

What is the most overhyped trend from the last 12 months - and why?

Calling everything AI slop, and I mean everything. Sometimes AI wasn't even used. Slop was word of the year for a reason, and players are right to call it out. When it is deserved.

Once everything is slop, nothing is. Whether AI touched a game was never the interesting question. Whether it's fun always was.

What key trend should we be paying attention to in the next 12 months?

The rise of UGC and player creation becoming the main event rather than a side feature. On Fortnite, creator-made islands now take nearly half of all playtime. The more important shift is happening inside individual games: Baldur's Gate 3 opened up official mod support and has passed a billion mod downloads.

The catch is that doing it properly has cost studios years (and budgets). Watch for that cost to collapse. When it does, every game with a loyal audience becomes a creation platform in its own right.

Is hypercasual gaming here to stay?

100%. What else would people do while their Claude is musing?

Can people get in touch with you at the event? What sort of people would you like to connect with?

Absolutely, find me on MeetToMatch, or grab me after the panel. LinkedIn and email are wonderful too. If you have a launched game or are building one, we have a lot to talk about.