Every session you publish is a billboard. Every shared link is a player-to-player ad. The creator economy on wilds.ai is built to reward the people making worlds and characters the community actually plays. not the people with the biggest followings.Every session you publish is a billboard. Every shared link is a player-to-player ad. The creator economy on wilds.ai is built to reward the people making worlds and characters the community actually plays. not the people with the biggest followings.

#The distribution loop

Every game session and character chat sidebar shows a small footer: play count, live player count, favorites, the creator's @username, and a share button. This is the acquisition engine. If someone plays your world and likes it, they see your handle, not the platform's. and one tap shares the world URL.

Every share also carries your referral code. Tap share on any world or character, yours or someone else's, and the link includes your ?ref= code automatically. When a new player joins wilds.ai through it you earn the referral credits below, and the world's creator keeps earning from every play. Share a world you love and you both win, even if you didn't build it.

This is different from most creator platforms. You don't need followers. You need worlds worth playing.

#Four revenue mechanisms

Creators earn in three ways:

• Referral credits (every tier). Every account gets a unique referral link at signup, visible at Account → Refer. Share the link as wilds.ai/r/<your-code>. Earn 250 credits when a referred friend verifies their email. Earn another 500 credits if they upgrade to Plus, Pro, or Forge within 90 days. No lifetime cap (subject to a 20-conversion-per-day anti-fraud limit). Email and in-app notifications fire on every conversion; both toggles live at Settings → Notifications. (Amounts: CREDITS_VERIFIED = 250 and CREDITS_PAID_UPGRADE = 500 in src/lib/server/referrals/conversion-service.ts.)
• Audience reward credits (every tier, scales with plan). Every unique account that plays a world you published OR chats with a character you published gives you credits per day. Rate scales with plan: Free 0.2, Plus 0.3, Pro 0.4, Forge 0.5 (2.5x the Free rate). Worlds and character chats both count. A single audience-account that plays your world AND chats with your character in the same 24-hour window only counts once. Your own plays of your own world never count. Batched daily, credits flow into your main balance and spend like any other credits.
  • Uploaded games earn the same way. A ROM, interactive-fiction file, or web game you upload and publish earns identically to an AI-built world. there's no separate, lower rate for uploads. The same per-audience-day credits apply.
  • Earning eligibility depends on rights, not format. Work you made (original) earns. Third-party work you hold under a license with commercial rights earns. Public-domain games and others' freely-licensed work are publishable and fully playable, but non-earning. you can share them, they just don't pay you. The upload form shows an eligibility line before you submit, and the submitting a world to the metaverse guide covers the rights basis in full.
• Marketplace listings (any paid plan). Publish an eligible world to the catalog and players can unlock it with in-world $WILD, fixed-price or pay-what-you-want. See publishing your worlds for the step-by-step.

See how creator rewards work for the full creator-facing guide.

#What counts as a published world

Any world with visibility set to Public gets listed in the Explore catalog, can be favorited, and earns play rewards on every tier (rate scales by plan, and the world must be earning-eligible. see above). You control visibility per world from its settings page.

• Private. only you can see or play it.
• Unlisted. anyone with the link can play, but it doesn't appear in Explore.
• Public. listed in Explore, searchable, favoriteable, reward-eligible.

#What gets discovered

The Explore catalog sorts by four signals:

1. Trending. play velocity over the last 7 days. The engine that catches new worlds.
2. New. last 14 days, sorted by recency. The engine that surfaces fresh work.
3. Popular. all-time plays.
4. Top Rated. highest average rating with a minimum of 20 sessions.

The algorithm weighs trending heavily for the top-of-catalog slots. A world that gets 30 plays in its first day will out-rank a world with 500 all-time plays from a year ago.

#How to actually get plays

There's no trick. These are the things that work, in order:

1. Write a prompt with teeth. See the writing great prompts guide. The single biggest predictor of play count is whether the world is interesting in the first 90 seconds.
2. Give it a real title and tagline. Not "Untitled World 47". A title that tells someone what they'd be getting into.
3. Publish a good cover image. The catalog is visual. Worlds with generated cover art get 3× the click-through of worlds without.
4. Share it in one place that isn't wilds.ai. Discord server, subreddit, Twitter, a text to a friend. External referrals matter more than anything on-platform.
5. Play sessions of your own world publicly. every session you run shows up in your activity feed and nudges the algorithm.

#What not to do

• Don't publish 20 worlds in a week. Quality > quantity. One good world outperforms 10 mediocre ones for discovery weight.
• Don't inflate play count by creating alts. It's against terms of service, and the abuse detection catches the obvious patterns.
• Don't spam variants of the same prompt. Each world should be substantively different or the moderation queue will flag them.
• Don't under-price mature content. If you're building in the Mature tier, make it good. the audience is smaller and has higher standards.

#Your creator profile

Every signed-up account with a claimed username gets a public profile at wilds.ai/yourname. It shows:

• Your published worlds and characters
• Your all-time stats (followers, world count, character count, creator earnings. every tier)
• The personal-detail block: real or display name, headline, location, pronouns, bio, languages, and external links — every field individually controlled (see Privacy controls below)
• A profile banner image and accent color you set in /app/settings/profile
• Pinned items (up to six published worlds or characters, surfaced at the top)
• Verified badge for creators we've reached out to and confirmed
• Mutual indicators when you view someone else's profile: "Follows you" and "Followed by N people you follow"
• The Collections section (see below)

Treat it like a portfolio. Worlds you're proud of, characters you want to be associated with.

#Privacy controls on the public profile

Personal-detail fields default to Private — they appear blank on your /yourname page until you opt them in. Each field has its own audience selector at /app/settings/profile:

• Public — anyone, signed in or not, sees the field.
• Followers — only accounts that follow you see it.
• Private — only you see it on your own profile.

@username, display name, and avatar are always public; they're how people find you. Everything else is your call. There's also a master "Discoverable in search & directory" switch — turn it off and you disappear from the creators directory, trending creators, and the suggested-creators rail. Your /yourname page still resolves for anyone with the direct link.

#Collections

A collection is a named, shareable list of public worlds and characters. Create one from any world card or character card — click the bookmark icon on the cover, then either pick an existing collection or click "+ New collection". The list appears on your creator profile as a Collections section, with the same three-audience visibility (public / followers / private) as your personal-detail fields.

Collections live at wilds.ai/yourname/collections/your-slug.

#Getting discovered

Once you've published at least one public world or character, you appear in:

• The creators directory at /creators (public) and /app/browse/creators (in-app). Sortable by trending, most-followed, newest, most worlds. Filterable to verified-only. Paginated 30 per page with arrow-key shortcuts (← →, Home, End).
• The nav search — placeholder reads "Search worlds, characters & creators…". Matches your @username, display name, and any publicly set personal-detail field. Private fields never appear in search.
• The suggested-creators rail on /app/browse/creators — second-degree follows from people you already follow, plus creators of worlds and characters you've favorited.
• The trending creators sidebar — composite score across plays, favorites, follows, and reviews over the last 7 days.

Accounts with zero public worlds and zero public characters don't appear in any discovery surface. You're an account; you become a creator when you ship something.

#What's coming

• Top creator leaderboard with weekly rotation.
• Creator-to-player messaging (opt-in) so players can tip creators or leave longer reviews.
• Staff-curated collections featuring individual creators.

If you want to shape the economy before it ships, the Discord has a #creator-feedback channel. Creators who engage early get early access to new distribution features.

#References

1. Credits and Billing: How credits work for players.
2. Creator Studio: The editor where you build and publish worlds.
3. wilds.ai Pricing: Forge plan details ($39/mo, creator earnings).
4. Browse and Play: How players discover your worlds.
5. wilds.ai Discord: #creator-feedback channel for economy discussions.