We are a group of creative people who help organizations make their ideas beautiful.
Above Par-adowski Earns Webby Honors, Wins WebXR Awards’ Game of the Year
Following a win for Game of the Year at the WebXR Awards in March, Paradowski Creative is proud to announce that Above Par-adowski WebXR Mini-Golf was honored by the Webby Awards for excellence in Immersive Gaming. It’s the agency’s second time as a Webby honoree in an immersive category after Apart: Posters from a Social Distance was similarly recognized in 2020.
Above Par-adowski is an original VR mini-golf game that began as a 40-hour prototype and evolved into a native-quality gameplay experience featured on the Meta Quest homepage with a case study on Meta’s blog. The game was also named Glitch’s “Coolest WebXR Experience” of 2022, won a Silver Addy Award, and garnered these impressive analytics since launch in November:
•
115,000+ unique VR users from 168 countries
•
700,000+ made putts
•
6:30 average time on site
•
63% of users returned a second time
Members of Paradowski's Emerging Technology Team pose with their WebXR Award for Game of the Year (left to right: Dan Rayfield, Gus Hattrich, Ethan Michalicek, Andy Wise, Madeleine Sutherland, Colin Freeman, Kevin Olson, Ayushman Johri, James Kane, Irina Fawcett, Noah Ilbery).
Above Par-adowski was also recently highlighted by journalist David Heaney of UploadVR. Heaney positioned Paradowski’s work alongside Meta’s own first-party content and explained some key advantages of web-based games:
“You can access WebXR apps near-instantly via the browser like any other web app. No installation or updates are required, and the developer doesn’t need approval from a central app store authority … While [Meta’s] Project Flowerbed runs at 72Hz, [Paradowski’s] WebXR mini-golf runs at 90Hz.”
James Kane, Director of Emerging Technology at Paradowski, sees those features becoming big differentiators as XR platforms and devices proliferate over time.
“Not only can web-based games achieve the same quality as any title on Meta’s app store, they can even exceed native apps in terms of accessibility, load time, entry UX and cross-platform support,” says Kane. “The metaverse becomes as simple as click, click – another world.”
“We couldn’t be happier with the reaction we’ve had from players, the WebXR community, the press, and increasingly, XR platform makers themselves. It’s already led to exciting new projects, partnerships and clients as we continue to invest in original IP and open source contributions that benefit the entire industry, including our next original title, The Escape Artist.”
The Escape Artist, a VR escape room game now in production, aspires to break new ground in terms of storytelling, art direction and puzzle mechanics on the immersive web. It’s currently slated to launch in June 2023.