dabbling, frivolling, idling, loafing, loitering, playing and procrastinating
9 Feb
How didn’t you know? Every mother and his dog is on the train to flogging gamers for all their worth, so why aren’t you? Soon you can be making the millions from this clearly untapped market!
Honestly, there’s been loads of attempts that clearly worked, just look at these websites for ideas on how to run your own games for cash website!
Now all these sites have one thing in common, and its not that they are all making lots of money, it’s that they’re all shutdown.
If you have been in the gaming scene in the past 5 years you should have heard of at least one of the above mentioned companies, and you know that they weren’t successful. Which is a shame, but that’s just the way it goes.
They all have fallen into this same trap…
Step 1
The top players make money from beating the less skilled players.
Step 2
The top players rake in the cash, while the low skill players leave and don’t come back and don’t recommend your site.
Step 3
You attempt to attract new players by giving them free money to play with since all but the top skilled players have left.
Step 4
See Step 1.
I do hope that one day, the new budding entrepreneurs out there will look at the past efforts of this and go…
“Oh, look, there’s been other people who tried this, and from the looks of their websites it didn’t work out too well for them as none succeeded, perhaps we should try another area in gaming instead”
…and then leave it at that and try something else. Instead it seems to go like this…
“These other people failed at this, so let’s copy them, put a different spin on it, and then get the gaming sites to post news for us about how this time, it’ll work”
So why this post? There’s a new bunch of people on the street who think that they have the answer on how to make money from cash gaming (needless to say; whatever it is, it won’t work). They are called PlayAll; bets anyone on how long they’ll last?
One Response for "Playing games for cash works don’t you know!"
Hey Limi,
For full disclosure at this point, I’d like to say that I am ex-employee of GoBLAM!
Plenty of what you say is true. However, I think you’ve missed a few important points. Firstly, your list of failures is far too short. There are several others you could add to that list (off the top of my head XFire [yip, they tried under the name Ultimate Arena before they made the xFire client!] and BigLeagueGaming). You are correct that many did repeat the mistakes of not balancing the playing field between good players and bad players. You did miss that some of those failures tried to write their own games, which I think was a mistake.
The reason I bring these up is that GoBLAM! didn’t fail for the reasons you lay out in your post (not to say that in time it wouldn’t have) because we specifically saw those problems and avoided them by implementing a handicapping system. Other outfits had tried to use skill segregation to try and level the playing fields (which also didn’t work). The reason that GoBLAM shut down is that Valve would not license their product (okay that’s not entirely true; they wouldn’t license at a price that we could afford….and in my opinion anyone in this space could have afforded). The handicapping system appeared to work and address the problems you have listed. Basically, the most skilled player didn’t always win. They would win if they were playing at their average or better, similarly a weaker player could win if on average in a game they played better than they usually did. Our internal numbers showed that weaker player retention was higher and the spread of winning much wider than if there was no handicapping system.
Regardless….a fair post for the most part, but perhaps a little over simplified.
regards,
zb.
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