Ask HN: Help us create a startup in the gaming space
Hi all-
Recently, a fellow HN'r and I got it in our heads to build a startup in the gaming space. We have bounced around ideas and are really not happy with what our less-than-creative minds have come up with. As a community that can solve even mysterious medical problems (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399450), we thought that you all could certainly provide some good insight into what is missing/needs fixing in the gaming community. In any case, some things we have considered:
1) Social network for gamers 2) Groupon like site for gamers 3) Deals for gamers based on playing habits 4) Meetup for gamers
Anyway, would love some input. Fire Away!
49 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 81.7 ms ] threadEdit: sorry reread post - so no games, right?
One idea i've been thinking about is an html5 game of M.U.L.E - a classic 4-player 8-bit game. After seeing the html5 versions of asteroids and 3d tetris (torus), seems like taking it to the next level with lobbies and online match-making (Aka backend web support) would make this kind of game possible now.
"As an online discussion about gaming grows longer, the probability of mentioning Dwarf Fortress approaches 1"
Is this kind of like what scvngr is doing?
scvngr.com is just the sort of platform that could enable a real life achievement app.
I don't think that real life achievements necessarily imply location. For instance, an achievement where you "Watched every episode of Friends" is interesting and something people may enjoy finding out about you... but it didn't happen in a single location. Or necessarily a single time.
But that is my take on it. I may be wrong. scvngr.com definitely do it right and it's more interesting to me than foursquare. scvngr.com is ideal for city councils, the smithsonian and universities to create great user experiences in certain locations but focuses too much on location. In my opinion there is room for an even broader application.
It talks about the history of objects, the future that Schell talks about, and then what's next after that... 'biots.'
There are a few really interesting things that came out of the project. First off, getting people to participate is hard. Without friends or others publicly participating it is less fun and becomes a list of achievements / resume / bragsheet / etc. No one wants to have the fewest achievements. Verifying or other similar proof is difficult. There are plenty of technical solutions but balancing them is key. I ran through a lot of combination and there is a fine line between the verifying processing being clumsy/difficult and being trivially hackable. There have been a lot of unsuccessful attempts in this seemingly obvious space[1,2].
I have continued thinking about this and would love to be involved in creating such an application. Currently I'm bootstrapping which doesn't match up well with this sort of project so it was shelved.
I think a successful real life achievement app is likely to start out with a small team including design and marketing. So it's unlikely to be bootstrapped, at least by me. But, never say never. Something simple may very well be better than the bloat that is out there. Anything that relies on facebook or iphone won't be the overall winner. It needs to be broader than that. There just aren't enough people comfortable with facebook or using their iphone. Since a successful implementation of the idea involves the network effect the winner will need to be ubiquitous. I guess that is just another way of saying it'll likely be a webapp first then a mobile app and facebook app second.
Some interesting related attempts:
[1] Life Points http://apps.facebook.com/getlifepoints/
[2] Booyah http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93475-Booyah-Bring... who knows what happened to it ... but it is now "MyTown!" http://www.booyah.com/
EDIT: syntax... owned by markup.
Anything to do with deals is going to be too niche I think ... how often do people buy new games? When I only need to visit your site every other month it's far too easy for someone I visit every day to replace you.
Meetups I think is also going to be a tough battle, there's already (I believe) huge lan party organizations.
What does your specific interests in gaming come from?
A social network of this kind would be a natural place to for organized playing groups (clans, guilds, etc.) to form, organize, recruit, schedule and so on. Individuals and groups alike could display their "home" or favorite servers/shards/whatever, affiliations, and so on.
There'd have to be some thought put into the mechanics of managing profiles, as a single player may wish to have several character profiles on the system without publicly linking them (FPS vs. MMO handles), and some games may not have proxy character identities but refer directly to the player instead (Plants vs. Zombies and other casual games).
I think there have been some moves in this general direction by gaming sites that have some kind of community aspect, but nothing that really came close to this more specific concept of users managing a collection of their virtual identities which each may have their own separate network of associated teammates or friends.
I've ran some numbers of this and the biggest problem is gamers won't pay for anything, they hate ads and they don't click through. So when evaluating this versus other opportunities it loses out because there are still plenty of other better options. All that being said there is a need and after you have a loyal user base there is always a way to monetize it (right!?).
I've seen a number of these sorts of sites come and go over the years. Even a few facebook apps. No one has come close to nailing it. It seems that founders are not gamers; they miss the boat and make it too social network like. And if they are gamers, they never seem to push the site out of it's alpha phase.
The younger net-native generation is no doubt resistant to paying for a service of this kind. The obvious strategies for making (paid) membership attractive would be discount on games and gear and access to anything exclusive and/or pre-release (beta codes, demos, strategy guides). Making that happen has its own set of challenges, of course...
Start easy with tic-tac-toe, checkers, backgammon then chess.
Add card games, solitaire, spades, canasta, etc
Then, when the site matures, introduce games like farmville, mafia wars, etc.
Emphasis in visuals, stunning 3D views, etc.
Focus also in the social aspect, lobbies, chat rooms, rankings, tournaments.
There's a large swathe of the population for whom http://www.pogo.com is the beginning and the end for games, and I would be the intersection between them and the iPad is going to get bigger and bigger.
http://mygamebot.appspot.com
* sorry, no IE
The trouble is, most people are perfectly happy with Pogo/Yahoo/MSN game sites. They don't want to move.
Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_be...
I largely agree with the overall, albeit crotchety, sentiment: "Just pay them". That said, http://fold.it is ingenious.
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.
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
Some fine folks over there.
I currently work in the game industry, previously worked in the game industry, and have worked for non-industry consultancies that are trying to break into the industry.
First, if you're not a gamer yourself, you're not going to get much traction. You'll be able to check reasonable boxes of features, and no-one will ever use them, and you won't understand why. The domain knowledge is cliquish and subtle and if you don't actually play games (a lot), there's no way to acquire it.
Your first idea is a great example of this, and it's the first one most people hit on, because there aren't a lot of web-based communities for gamers like there are for other markets. This is because the community is in the individual games and on the individual consoles. A consultancy I worked for made this same mistake, actively pitching companies by saying "we can help build community around your games" and being thrown out of offices for their ignorance. This is also why you can't make a social network that effectively ties together PC, PS3 and Xbox360 gamers: the console manufacturers and publishers don't want you to. Rupture might have gotten close, but then EA bought them, and then shut them down.
2, 3) Groupon for gamers doesn't make sense on the consoles, because you'll need to get MS/Sony/Nintendo buy-in, and Steam already runs sales on the PC, and there are already the indie game bundles that they organize themselves... there's no pain point there.
In fact, someone else mentioned this already: gamers don't have a lot of pain points that a startup can address. There's a big one in the MMO space: I get an MMO and it's awesome and I tell my friends, but by the time they pay for a subscription, the server I'm on is full and they are all on some other server, so I have to re-roll and start again. There's no good way to get everyone "on the same page" quickly and easily... and there's no way for you to do it as an outsider. That's functionality that really has to be provided by the MMO developers and supported by the publisher.
4) There is one LAN gaming center in Austin, TX left. It's dying from utter lack of interest. Gamers don't need to meet in real life. That's the whole point of networked consoles and PCs.
Security is some place you might be able to break in: a universal PC gaming security dongle. WoW already offers an RSA keyfob-style authenticator. Steam is basically online DRM like Ubisoft was doing, except the value proposition is enough to make gamers not care. Give publishers your dongle for free. Give it away to gamers. Charge the publishers and studios a retainer for integration and on-going support and servers for storing data.
Steam will be your biggest competitor in this, because along with DRM, they also offer cloud data storage across Mac and PC (and expectedly Linux).
All the other tech, like MMO servers and graphics engines, many game companies still believe they know best and would rather build themselves (NIH is strong in the industry).
The game industry is always several years behind research in some levels, most notably around content creation. A modern, triple-A title has hundreds of artists laboring for years on all of the art for a game. All the tools to export art from Max or Maya or Z-brush or Modo or whatever are custom, and buggy, and one-offs, because every engine (except for Unity, apparently) has their own custom import format instead of using a standard like COLLADA and then baking out the models into a packaging format afterwards.
Just like CGI helped George Lucas eliminate actors, if you can build something that eliminates the need for more artists, you'll be able to sell that.
Things like procedural content generation: even open-source game engine tech like OGRE supports integration with systems like Speedtree, which is a specialized procedural foliage generator, because when you're making an outdoor scene, making trees and bushes and grasses by hand takes a lot of a real person's time: http://www.speedtree.com/
The latest version of UnrealEngine3 supports procedural building generation: you tell it how buildings are made and all of the art assets that make up corners and sides and windows and walls and such, and it'll generate a building out of all the component art, but you still have to build the component art: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ProceduralBuildings.html (Also, this is stuff that was in SIGGRAPH papers a decade ago.)
Procedural texture generate for art is also still really in its infancy as far as adoption goes. Besides what was done in Spore, I only know of one tools company that does it: http://www.allegorithmic.com/
Animating characters is expensive. A lot of it's motion captured, which is expensive, and requires a lot of refinement by character animators, and a lot of it's still done by hand. Creating characters and all the outfits they wear all the time is such a chore. I once wanted to use real-time game engines and real-time motion capture to put on theatre productions. If you could get the capture equipment good enough for that, and inexpensive enough to use for children's theatre, that would be a hardware win, but you shouldn't even have to do that.
This is all something that I believe could be done procedurally.
I mean, people all have a certain set of proportions, right? With a fractal variety of differences. Generate bodies and then apply procedural stylistic changes. Let artists define their character style and algorithmically riff off that. Then do the same for clothing and outfit models and textures. Content creation for games should be picking characters out of a line-up and tweaking them by turning knobs and dials, not modeling by hand. Same for monsters and other enemies. There are thousands of years of fashion design that could be boiled down to algorithms and procedural generation.
I believe you could do the same for gameplay. Some Doom map generators were excellent. Gameplay has gotten different and more complex, but so has our understand of what's fun. Generate plausibly fun maps as starting points for content generation based on the gameplay story.
All of this is several steps beyond where any game company thinks, because the development model doesn't support ongoing, repeat development. If you're an engine company like Emergent, who makes the Gamebryo tech, you'll sell to one company, and at some point early on they'll stop taking your updates because they've forked something and don't have time to re-integrate it, and then you'll never hear from them again because their game didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio.
Plus, some of what I'm talking about isn't supported by research ye...
I've seen (1) but didn't bother keeping a link because, well, I don't see that gamers actually have a lot in common and care to socialize based on games. Video games are so common that I don't see them as more than a granfalloon. Could easily be wrong here. (2) Dunno if you can do it without geography in your favor like Groupon, but good luck. (3) I think all of the stories of the business of video games in the last year or two (Zynga, EA charging used gamers, DLC, unlock codes, virtual goods) have been about businesses finding new ways to charge more based on playing habits, not less. That's why all the fuss about virtual currencies, you can get near-perfect segmentation.