Jon Radoff, the CEO of GamerDNA, was in a good mood. His company hosted a well-attended party at the Game Developer's Conference, mostly organized through Twitter, wow gold where scads of industry professionals and writers traded cards, enjoyed some food, and talked about games. This is what he does best, and why he created GamerDNA: to bring gamers together.
"I wanted a way where you could discover new games, find out about play experiences, and really know what's happening within gaming, but do it in a really authentic way, drawing from lots and lots of people who are like yourself," he told Ars. He was always interested in getting gamers together; Radoff's first company released a text-based online title "with up to 250 players online at once." We had a laugh over how large that used to seem. wow gold The question is, how do you convince gamers to let you watch their habits, and profit from it?
If you want to meet a real woman in WoW, find an Alliance Druid. That being said, it's still mostly men.On the site, you sign up and share your Xbox Live gamertag, your Steam ID, or your Xfire ID, and then the site observes what games you're playing. "It's not scraping... well, there are different techniques technologically," he explained. "We have a relationship with Microsoft, we have an API where you go directly to the Xbox Live datacenter, and with your gamer tag we pull down all the games you're playing. We aggregate all this data from the play networks into a feed, wow gold which shows what kind of games you're playing, what you're doing in the games, and what progress you're making."
It may sound like big brother, but Radoff is after community. The site pays attention to what you're playing, and uses that data to nudge you towards other players with similar playing habits, or perhaps towards joining a clan for the new game the system knows you picked up. Looking at what you're playing and cross-referencing it with what other gamers play and how they rate the games, the site can point you towards other games you may enjoy. GamerDNA is bringing gaming habits into the cloud, in other words, and using its large user base to help you find other gamers and games.
"All that information, that's a catalyst for conversation. The really interesting magic is when people talk about what they did in the game," Radoff said, his eyes gleaming. Right now the site enjoys half a million users, but Radoff told me they're not near where they want to be: in the millions.
This data is valuable, but is it sold? "The user is in total control, for every network you sign up on, you can make it a private feed or only your friends can see it, or you can make it public," Radoff said. "That said, even if you make it public, we don't take individual data and give it to anyone. It's the conclusions you can draw from the patterns, wow gold you can look at these trends, and then say, 'here's a game that people like you find interesting.'"
There is advertising on the site, but the real money is in commerce. GamerDNA knows what you like, and would love for you to buy the sequel to those games from its Amazon links. Or rent games for your new console via Gamefly. "We want to do for games what Last.fm did for music," Radoff told me. GamerDNA wants to know what you're playing, it wants you to interact with other gamers like you so you can figure out the next game to buy or rent, and then (of course) it wants to provide that game to you.
The actual data is interesting, but perhaps not in the monetary sense. "There is some interest on the part of game publishers to understand those microtrends, but there doesn't seem to be much of a hunger in the industry to pay for that information, and we don't feel like that's what our business model should be about." GamerDNA does track trends, though, and shares that information on its blog. wow gold We asked Radoff for information that he found intriguing, and this what he shared.
