New Gaming Social Network Now in Beta…

The Great Games Experiment is “a social networking community for gamers, developers and publishers to play, show off, promote and ultimately enjoy games.” Sounds good to me. Raph Koster blogged this recently, along with two other sites that…

Stuff like jayisgames.com, addictinggames.com, http://www.mygamercard.net and http://www.bigfishgames.com (which is allowing you to create profiles now along with downloading demos and buying games). I think that’s mostly what people want. What I think may still catch on here is some place that offers effective, easy-to-use MySpace plugins for games and gamer account information (you can already put your LiveArcade profile up on MySpace ). This will just be a place to host flash scripts though, not a tool or a platform.

I’ve been pretty consistently unimpressed by Garage Games and their tools and I don’t expect any of these sites to take off by creating tools for users to make games. It’s always going to be a small cadre of specialist users which create games content just as it has always been a very small cadre of specialist players who used things like in-game toolkits. The creativity, math skills, art skills, etc., required to make any sort of decent game are just not common currency. The skills required to make a YouTube video are ubiquitious by comparision. In fact most of the content on YouTube that people actually look at is pirated/illegal rebroadcastings, i.e. merely by-products from a different market.

I’m not saying there might be an occasional person who finds these as outlets for some amazing game ideas that had no other outlet. But it really does seem like a play for site traffic ala YouTube. The problem is, YouTube is based on an existing tech base. ANYONE can upload because everyone (on the net) has a TV and probable access to a VCR or Tivo. It takes a web cam and three minute to make a two-minute YouTube vid.

Unlike video there’s no easy copy-n-paste or recording technology for games. Games are about structure, and structure isn’t easily expressed or copied in tiny snippets unless the structure itself is tiny.

Whats more interesting is these various game aggregators are getting VC funding now (I know of at least 3) so we can assume the business model is viable and that VC’s are interested in the (free)games aggregation business model at least for flash and casual games.

More interest in the game space is great…

“Are a lot of players actually looking for it?”

I think that depends heavily on what types of “players” you want, what type of community your building, and how you frame your mission….but thats just my personal bias

But are a lot of players actually looking for it?

Speaking only for myself it depends on whether or not developers and publishers are interested in it. More specifically, whether or not they upload demos &/or games. I’d be much less interested in the pure social networking. If I want to know what developers are thinking I can come here or those places over on the sidebar

At the very least, it will serve as a contact base for the mod community. At best, it will skyrocket the indie developer to awesomeness.