4 ms·

I've built startups in the gaming space for the past ten years. Some are successful (esports.com was sold back in the 90's), some mediocre (gameriot.com reached

I've built startups in the gaming space for the past ten years. Some are successful (esports.com was sold back in the 90's), some mediocre (gameriot.com reached over 1 million uniques for a few months), and some failures (I won't bore you with these but they never got off the ground). I don't recommend doing the gaming thing. It's a very competitive space with very little actual 'dollars' on the advertising side. Gaming was the 'in' thing for 2009, and the people who sold ads against it still floundered. With that out of the way, here's my two cents: 1) Gamers don't like to pay for anything. Period. They have a very high piracy rate. 2) PC gamers should be your target. Console gamers rarely do significant 'gaming' stuff on their PC. (I know this is a generalization but I strongly believe it) The exception are transactional sites (see point 4) 3) I would strongly suggest that you avoid a 'social network for gamers' at all costs. I've built a few of these and they all fail miserably. The only marginally successful ones are XFire and Raptr. Rupture never really launched but was purchased for 10m so I guess you could call it a success? 4) Tying into game API's is ridiculously hard because you have to get every 'publisher' on board. The 'Developer' of the game always wants to do cool stuff with their games, but the publisher controls the budget for external integration and API's and what not. 5) Cheat Codes is the one area that hasn't been done to death that I see some potential in. Sites like Cheatcodes.com and MyCheats are not very social, built on old technology, and are RIDICULOUSLY profitable. 6) If you build ANYTHING for PC, make sure it is focused around World of Warcraft. It's the cash cow and nothing else compares. 7) Gamers don't like to leave their houses. I know that this 'myth' has been debunked countless time but the fact is, it's very hard to get someone to go somewhere else to play a game with their friend. Just hit them on their console or computer. 8) The one idea that I've had floating around is a 'lifestream' type site for gaming. I envisioned it as a low tech solution like 'upload your kill shot, brag about it' or something like that. People just take a pic w/ their iphone, you check the timestamp against their Xbox gamer tag to see who they were playing against, then you tag the photo w/ their names. Could work w/ video too. Console gamers don't really have much that ties them to their PC, so the iPhone (or any mobile device) is one of the few ways to get them while they're playing. Sorry for the stream of consciousness. I'm a bit jaded from being in the gaming space for so long. Recently started something focusing on another industry (hair salons, oddly enough) and it's very gratifying.

Lewisham 16y ago
One thing I would add to this (especially the gamers don't pay for stuff outside of games and their hardware) is that gamers don't have a lot of pain points that can be served by a scrappy startup. They have communities (NeoGAF, Something Awful, Quarter to Nine, Penny Arcade) where they connect with like-minded people. There are usually so few in most towns that its easy to find local gamers if you want to (hobby stores, mostly) but usually gamers don't. Most of their gaming friends are online, and don't need a face-to-face. What gamers want is new, shiny, and strongly entwined to the walled gardens being run by the console manufacturers. Unfortunately, those walls means the only people able to innovate effectively in the space are those very same console manufacturers. If something cool was to come from doing a startup for gamers, it would need to lean heavily on APIs from other games, and having recently studied this (to be presented at [1]), while there are some read-only services, there's certainly not enough out there to start doing anything interesting with. I am not even sure that the data you could get from them would necessarily be of value. Gamers are interested in their data, but there's not a lot you can tangibly create from that data, unlike say being a poster printing company that uses the Flickr API. And if they don't click through ads, what are they going to buy? I guess I'm a big naysayer as well, but I just don't see the obvious pain points that a startup could serve gamers. My gut feeling is there's lower hanging fruit in the web app sea. [1] http://fdg2010.org/Main.html http://fdg2010.org/Main.html

Lewisham 16y ago

One thing I would add to this (especially the gamers don't pay for stuff outside of games and their hardware) is that gamers don't have a lot of pain points that can be served by a scrappy startup. They have communities (NeoGAF, Something Awful, Quarter to Nine, Penny Arcade) where they connect with like-minded people. There are usually so few in most towns that its easy to find local gamers if you want to (hobby stores, mostly) but usually gamers don't. Most of their gaming friends are online, and don't need a face-to-face. What gamers want is new, shiny, and strongly entwined to the walled gardens being run by the console manufacturers. Unfortunately, those walls means the only people able to innovate effectively in the space are those very same console manufacturers. If something cool was to come from doing a startup for gamers, it would need to lean heavily on APIs from other games, and having recently studied this (to be presented at [1]), while there are some read-only services, there's certainly not enough out there to start doing anything interesting with. I am not even sure that the data you could get from them would necessarily be of value. Gamers are interested in their data, but there's not a lot you can tangibly create from that data, unlike say being a poster printing company that uses the Flickr API. And if they don't click through ads, what are they going to buy? I guess I'm a big naysayer as well, but I just don't see the obvious pain points that a startup could serve gamers. My gut feeling is there's lower hanging fruit in the web app sea. [1] http://fdg2010.org/Main.html http://fdg2010.org/Main.html