The Quest for Gaming’s Facebook
The race is one to build on an internet-wide phenomenon (Facebook) and apply it in a focussed fashion to the games industry. I’ve been reading quite a few press releases lately that detail several startups getting capital funding, and existing sites expanding their functionality, all in an effort to entire gamers to live out their gaming social lives on their site. Here’s some of the ones I’ve stumbled across:
GameStrata.com — an online ranking system and social network, the site develops “community tools for gamers”. Form Groups aligned with your game of choice, have your own personal forum, share tips and tricks, achievements and stats, form clans…you get the picture.
GamerDNA.com — “Bringing the world together through games”, GamerDNA.com just launched with a cool $3m in financing to expand development on a community that lets gamers meet up with friends, share exploits and keep on top of the who’s and what’s of their favourite games. They feel that “the scale and diversity of the gaming market demands a platform and genre-neutral community that encompasses all types of games and gamers.
RecruitingGrounds.com — Find and manage clans, play free arcade style games and build your own online gaming profile. Recruiting Grounds also offers tournaments, and tournament creation, gaming news and multimedia, as well as classified ads, groups and forums to get involved with.
Applied to a Facebook setting, where it’s built upon the appeal of communication between friends, family, and those of similar interest, it just might take off, but there’s not a lot of room in the niche to have multiple supported sites. Somewhat like the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray wars, one format (or site in this case) is bound to prevail. It’s kind of like a site development demolition derby and at this early stage of the game it’s difficult to predict who will come out on top.
To me, they might have a hard time marketing a broad-based social site for gamers, who tend to be very tightly clustered into niches and clans based on their own gaming preferences. Do die-hard SOCOM players really give a crap what’s going on in Guild Wars? People may, rather than being part of an entire community, self-marginalize into little cliques that operate under the larger umbrella of the site as separate, self-sufficient entities.
Image from Wikipedia.org
