During a walk through of the service with GameFly co-founder Sean Spector and product manager Jason Wade, they emphasized that this is not a money-making venture yet. At this point, GamePie is about building a strong community. Obviously there will be opportunities for monetization in the future, but that is not their top priority right now. Another big point is that GameFly and GamePie are two totally separate services. While GameFly has been a successful games by mail company in the United States, GamePie aims to be a global Web service, building a user base that expands outside of the U.S.
At its core, GamePie feels a lot like Flixster's movie application on Facebook. A good portion of the functionality is in both applications. GamePie lets you rate games you have played and compare those ratings with friends and with the community as a whole. You can also recommend a game to a friend if you think that they would like it.
When you drill down into a page for an individual game, you get some detailed information, such as the publisher, genre, and release date, along with which of your friends have played the game as well. The individual game page also exposes a community rating, which is an average of all of the reviews given to the game. Also included is a "Game Wall" on which users can post their comments and thoughts about the game in the same fashion as people write on the walls of profiles or groups.
Currently, GamePie features games from 10 platforms, including all of the most current. GamePie's selection is up to 15,000 titles at this point, with 40,000 promised by the end of the summer. Other features that are slated for GamePie in the future include linking with Xbox Live Gamertags and slicing review data in more ways in order to present interesting statistics to users.
With a lot of activity, GamePie could grow into a very useful and interesting Facebook application. At this point, the features are a little on the simplistic side. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I would like to see the service beefed up in the future, especially to include integration with GameFly, Xbox Live, and maybe even aggregated critic review scores from Metacritic. Even though the average review score from your friends is great, I think that the real value of this service lies in the data and insight generated from the community as a whole, rather than your select group of friends. As more of this data is exposed by GamePie, I think that it will evolve into a very interesting and valuable resource for gamers.
The online gaming site, Kongregate, makers of some of the best time sucking games out there, is adding a challenge platform to its Facebook application on Monday. As of Tomorrow, Facebook users will be able to challenge their friends to a variety of Kongregate games, which are playable through embedded versions in Facebook. Right now, you are able to challenge your friends to eight different games.
The implementation here is really great. Kongregate makes it very easy to throw down the gauntlet against one of your friends and see who is really the best. You earn points for doing a variety of activities, including beating your friends in a challenge. The whole thing is rounded out by leaderboards which are broken down by friends, networks, and all players. Given the extremely addicting nature of Kongregate's games, I think that this application will catch on really well. As we saw with Scrabulous, games have great potential on Facebook and Kongregate really nailed it with their challenge platform.
I had a lot of trouble pulling myself away from these games to write this post, so I think that people are really going to enjoy this. Some of the most successful applications on Facebook are those that bring out people's competitive nature. We saw that when Facebook's developer platform first launched with iLike's music quiz and I think that we are going to see that again with Kongregate.
WeGame, a user-generated content site for video games, announced the launch of the beta 1 version of their site today. At the risk of sounding like a marketing robot, the best way that I can explain the site is "YouTube for game videos." WeGame provides a free downloadable application that allows you to record in any of their currently supported games, which includes just about all of the hottest PC titles of the moment. After you record your video, the client allows you to easily upload to the site.
The actual site is fairly similar to other offerings from GameTrailers and GameVideos, but what will give them the edge is their recording client. The client can record either in regular Web video format, or in HD for the machinima enthusiasts. It has always been a huge pain to capture an in-game video, format it correctly, and upload it to a video site. WeGame simply solves that complication.
- prev
- 1
- next
