Toms Ce aims to change gaming content creation through Roam, a platform that enables all users to build sophisticated multiplayer games without coding expertise. 

Through partnerships with Warner Brothers and nearly 1,000 prominent creators, Roam combines gaming and social media capabilities, introducing new ways for creators to connect with their audiences.

From Competitive Gaming to Platform Innovation

Before founding Roam, Toms gained diverse experience managing international golf tournaments and leading teams of up to 40 people. He also built a gaming platform for NFT communities, which signed over 150 clients for 20k-50k deal packages and attracted a major investment from DWF Labs. 

Toms identified a crucial gap in the creator economy: while video creation tools have become widely accessible, game development remains out of reach for most creators. 

“Right now, no tools allow a non-technical person to build a high-quality game,” Toms points out. “We understood that there were [several] parts that you need to make decisions on to get a minimally viable game and engaging game. And we built our whole game-building stack part of our platform to answer all these questions through text prompts, decisions, or selections.”

Making Game Creation Intuitive

The Roam platform simplifies game development through an intuitive interface. 

“Roam works more or less like any other social app,” Toms explains. “You’ve got the content creation layer – the part of the app where you build the game. For example, on TikTok, that’s the video editor. On X, it’s the text box. For us, it’s our game-building flow.”

Social features play a crucial role: “Then the other part is the social layer, AKA you being able to add friends, follow people, see the feed where all the games are published, play the games, see all the stats, and discover all the different games published on the platform.”

Creators have shown particular interest in streaming capabilities. “Many creators want to stream the games to their Twitch/Kick/YouTube accounts as well as stream the game-building process to their accounts,” Toms notes. “That’s something we’re thinking about.”

Superior Engagement Through Gaming

Toms believes games are the “next most powerful” content type because they deliver higher engagement and monetization potential than any other. Research reinforces this claim.

According to Native Advertising Institute, gamified content consistently outperforms traditional media, with engagement times averaging over 60 seconds and click-through rates reaching 23%. The impact is particularly notable in advertising, where gaming elements transform passive viewing into active participation—globally, 15 unique players engage with playable branded content every second.

The time metrics highlight this advantage. “If you find a game that is somewhat engaging, the average person will play it for 15 to 120 minutes, depending on the game type,” he explains. “At the same time, if you put together a cool short video and even if someone rewatches it 10 times, what’s the total play time? Like a bit over a minute.”

According to Toms, games also show stronger monetization potential than traditional social media. 

“When you’re playing games, you buy power-ups, load up your credits, and make many purchases,” he says. “When you’re watching short-form videos, you don’t do any of that. It’s a very inorganic action to buy something when you’re watching short-form content.”

The community aspect distinguishes gaming. Toms explains: “When you’re playing a game, you’re in your favorite content creator’s built-out environment with their branding, music, and marketplaces with other community members that love the same content creator versus sitting alone on your couch browsing through 15-second clips, which is less engaging, less community, and less brand loyalty that you and the creator get out of that experience.”

Roam provides detailed analytics to optimize engagement. “We’re analyzing like heat maps of the games,” Toms explains. “We’re trying to figure out how to build more engaging game worlds so that your game would keep people in the game for longer. For example, maybe desert maps are bad [whereas] jungle maps with specific houses hold people for longer periods.”

The platform tracks key metrics: “The first is the average playtime. Then, the replay rate, i.e., the percent of players who’ll return to play.”

Innovative Revenue Generation

Roam offers creators multiple revenue streams through two main approaches. 

“There are two ways/categories we can monetize,” Toms explains. “The first one is in-game sales and subscriptions; you can seamlessly take your TikTok Shop and Shopify store and bring that into your game and sell either in-game items or real-life Items like merch or whatever you’re already selling, but just from your game.”

The second approach—in-game product placements—presents unique opportunities. “Something that we’re still working on that I think is going to generate creators the most money is in-game product placements, getting paid for putting products into your games as power-ups.”

Toms illustrates this with an example: “Let’s say we’ve got Ninja, a gaming content creator, and he’s built out a game that looks like a desert with some cactuses. He figures out that he doesn’t want to put any marketplaces there. He doesn’t want to put an entry fee on the game; he doesn’t want to put a subscription to the game. He just wants his users to have completely free access.”

Through Roam’s advertising marketplace, creators integrate brand products as gameplay enhancements. 

“[Ninja] can go to our advertising marketplace and choose to advertise for MrBeast Feastable Bars, and he will get a couple of Feastable bar assets that he has to place across his game,” Toms says. “From a player perspective, I find a red Feastable bar. After eating the red feastable bar, I can make a triple jump, or after eating a green Feastable bar, I get unlimited ammo.”

Platform Development and Testing

Roam maintains intensive testing and refinement processes. 

“We’re currently in our early access stage, so we’re intensively testing,” Toms explains. “We’ve just done our first round of testing and got a lot of valuable feedback. We have pulled the product apart in about 150 pieces and are stitching it back together.”

Creator partnerships drive development: “From day one of building this, we knew that getting creators on is basically like a really good hack for distribution,” Toms reveals. “So, we started signing content creators mostly from gaming and live streaming. We’re nearing 1,000 creators with anywhere from 100k to 10 million followers.”

The team maintains rapid development cycles: “This iteration cycle will be at least five to eight months long, and even longer after we go live,” Toms notes. “[We need to] get used to building stuff quickly, fixing stuff quickly, and keeping everyone happy during that process.”

Roam’s Outlook in the Gaming Industry

Toms sees substantial growth potential for Roam. 

“I believe that Roam is the lifetime company that over the next five to ten years is going to grow into a multi-billion dollar ecosystem of various gamification and like game creation tools for the wider creator economy and the whole gaming and consumer space,” he predicts.

Early platform adopters receive significant benefits. “We will guarantee that the use of the platform is free for them as long as the platform is live,” Toms explains. “We’re going to push their games higher into the feed for at least the first six months after we fully go live. Then we’ll give them every data point and raw analytics, way more than any other standard user gets.”

“The only way we can grow to that size is by just making sure that what we build makes a lot of value to many creators and users,” Tomes says. 

“The top priority we’ve always had from the very start is to make our users the happiest we can make them and to enable them to build the most fun games they’ve ever played or their fans have ever played.”