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.