Startup Idea #102: Democratizing games

The Internet has the ability to push the power from organisations to individuals. MetaPlace is providing such a platform for game developers and is threatening to do to the game industry what blogging did to publishing industry.

If we think about blogging and the changes it bought, it goes beyond replacing the publishing industry. Rather, it brought about an entire new ecosystem of products and services such as publishing platforms (wordpress, blogger), comment aggregation (Disqus, IntenseDebate), recommendation services (Zemanta), community services (MyBloglog), blog advertisements (Federated Media), delivery services (Feedburner), aggregation (techmeme), search (Google, Technorati), verticals (seeking alpha) et al.

Is it possible then to think that platforms such as MetaPlace will bring about a new gaming ecosystem as well? If so, what are the products and services that this new ecosystem will need?


Techmeme equivalent: if tens of thousands of games are being made, how do you know which game is the most interesting to play?

Zemanta equivalent: if we are to encourage a non technical person to develop a game, we need to make it easier to give him the right set of codes, images, models et al. This is where a recommendation service will be the most useful.

Last.fm equivalent: games are social in nature and there is a need for a social layer to be added onto the games people play. This means an opportunity to build a community service such as Last.fm where users can see who are similar to them in gaming tastes, what games are their friends playing, the top ten games of their social network according to the different genres et al.

TargetSpot equivalent: for the ecosystem to thrive, we need monetisation mechanisms. They can be in-game ads or virtual items or merchandising. Whatever the revenue models, we need someone to provide an easy way for a non-technical person to profit from the games he made through simple APIs.

Disqus equivalent: Rather than comments, users might need a score aggregation services to keep track of the scores from the different games he played. Based on the scores, a tournament service can then be developed where players of similar scores can compete.

Aggregating Verticals: serious games, advergames, educational games. All these can be aggregated and filtered to give players an easy way to navigate to what they want.

For the new gaming ecosystem to be developed, we will need lots of parts to be built by lots of gaming fans. If you have ideas or feedback, do leave a comment below.

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