Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

GamerDNA wants to do for gaming what did for music

GamerDNA watches what you play, how long you play it, and tracks what you like …

Jon Radoff, the CEO of GamerDNA, was in a good mood. His company hosted a well-attended party at the Game Developer's Conference, mostly organized through Twitter, where scads of industry professionals and writers traded cards, enjoyed some food, and talked about games. This is what he does best, and why he created GamerDNA: to bring gamers together.

"I wanted a way where you could discover new games, find out about play experiences, and really know what's happening within gaming, but do it in a really authentic way, drawing from lots and lots of people who are like yourself," he told Ars. He was always interested in getting gamers together; Radoff's first company released a text-based online title "with up to 250 players online at once." We had a laugh over how large that used to seem. The question is, how do you convince gamers to let you watch their habits, and profit from it?

If you want to meet a real woman in WoW, find an Alliance Druid. That being said, it's still mostly men.

On the site, you sign up and share your Xbox Live gamertag, your Steam ID, or your Xfire ID, and then the site observes what games you're playing. "It's not scraping... well, there are different techniques technologically," he explained. "We have a relationship with Microsoft, we have an API where you go directly to the Xbox Live datacenter, and with your gamer tag we pull down all the games you're playing. We aggregate all this data from the play networks into a feed, which shows what kind of games you're playing, what you're doing in the games, and what progress you're making."


It may sound like big brother, but Radoff is after community. The site pays attention to what you're playing, and uses that data to nudge you towards other players with similar playing habits, or perhaps towards joining a clan for the new game the system knows you picked up. Looking at what you're playing and cross-referencing it with what other gamers play and how they rate the games, the site can point you towards other games you may enjoy. GamerDNA is bringing gaming habits into the cloud, in other words, and using its large user base to help you find other gamers and games.

"All that information, that's a catalyst for conversation. The really interesting magic is when people talk about what they did in the game," Radoff said, his eyes gleaming. Right now the site enjoys half a million users, but Radoff told me they're not near where they want to be: in the millions.

This data is valuable, but is it sold? "The user is in total control, for every network you sign up on, you can make it a private feed or only your friends can see it, or you can make it public," Radoff said. "That said, even if you make it public, we don't take individual data and give it to anyone. It's the conclusions you can draw from the patterns, you can look at these trends, and then say, 'here's a game that people like you find interesting.'"

There is advertising on the site, but the real money is in commerce. GamerDNA knows what you like, and would love for you to buy the sequel to those games from its Amazon links. Or rent games for your new console via Gamefly. "We want to do for games what did for music," Radoff told me. GamerDNA wants to know what you're playing, it wants you to interact with other gamers like you so you can figure out the next game to buy or rent, and then (of course) it wants to provide that game to you.

The actual data is interesting, but perhaps not in the monetary sense. "There is some interest on the part of game publishers to understand those microtrends, but there doesn't seem to be much of a hunger in the industry to pay for that information, and we don't feel like that's what our business model should be about." GamerDNA does track trends, though, and shares that information on its blog. We asked Radoff for information that he found intriguing, and this what he shared.

Want to meet a woman in World of Warcraft? Chat up Alliance Druids.

you sign up for GamerDNA you tell us your sex... of course you have to
choose whether or not you want to expose this information. But people
opt-in to give their gender information, and we cross-reference that
with your WoW character."

So what's your character race/class combination that's most likely to actually be female? "We found
out it was Alliance Druids. If you want to meet a real woman in WoW, find an Alliance Druid. That being said, it's still mostly men."

What other games do Rock Band users like?

"Rock Band players by and large are a different type of
gamer, more part of the cultural mainstream. They do play a lot of core
games, however, and they play Bioshock a lot more than the average Xbox player," Radoff told Ars.

is that? "My hypothesis, and it's totally unvalidated, but I think it's
just... it's about the experience and the story and the narrative. I
think that's really quite similar to Rock Band. It's a party game about the fantasy of being a rock star, that idea that you can jump into a character. When I'm playing Call of Duty, I'm not pretending that I'm a soldier..."

His theory is that you put a lot of yourself into the character in these games, and that's where the attraction is.

publish this stuff on our blog every week. We just explored if people
who are part of Guilds play MMO titles longer? No shock, they do." This
gives marketers the data they need to seed a community: make it easier
for gamers to start guilds, and reward them for doing so early, and you
have dedicated players.

The draw of the information brings
people in—people like reading about the trends, and that brings them
in and makes them want to be a part of the site—and the social aspects
keep them there. There are a few kinks to work out; Radoff says they're
speaking to Sony but are not yet including PS3 information into the
site, the same with the Nintendo Wii. Still, the data is fascinating,
and gamers seem willing to share their habits if it helps them find
more games and find gamers to share them with. Being social, it seems,
is very good business right now.

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