We had the chance recently to sit down with Jon Radoff, CEO of gaming social network gamerDNA, for a discussion about gamer identity online as well as a tour of some of the new developments happening at the company whose stated goal is to "know gamers better than anyone in the world." For those not familiar with the site, gamerDNA is an online social network for gamers that can track your gameplay across multiple platforms (Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam activity can be automatically pulled into your profile) and add those experiences to your online profile, as well as recommend new games to you based on several factors including traits you identify as liking in the games you currently play. You can also share all of that gameplay activity back out with some of the other social networks you take part in including Twitter, Tumblr and FriendFeed, with privacy controls and settings to help you share only the data you're interested in sharing with others.

With the gaming social network space becoming pretty crowded these days — including sites like former Napster founder Shawn Fanning's Rupture (sold to Electronic Arts for an undisclosed sum between $15 and $30 million last year), former Xfire founder Dennis Fong's Raptr (check out our interview with Dennis here), Ugame based in the UK, WeGame focused around a client tool enabling gameplay video capture and sharing, and others — what does gamerDNA, originally founded as MMO social news and guild hosting site GuildCafe and galvanized into a bigger entity thanks to a $3 million venture investment from Flybridge Capital Partners, bring to the table that's different? We discovered a few key points during the interview, among them the Discovery Engine that takes a few different factors including gameplay history, the results of personality quizzes, and traits directly identified by gamers to create a gamer profile or "gamerDNA" that aims to identify something salient about you as an individual player, in order to better connect you with new games you might enjoy across gameplay platforms as well as with other players like you to connect with and share some of those game experiences with.

There's also the choice to eschew the client-based model some sites like Raptr and WeGame have adopted, instead strongly backing the concept of a portable gamer social identity on the web and truly embracing the web as the platform where identity, conversation and community are happening. Several times during the discussion Jon made the comparison to the Twitter model, in which the popular microblogging site acts less as a destination site and, through open APIs and a framework centered on connectivity, acts more as a catalyst for driving and enabling discussion than as a site that needs to be the explicit place where it all happens: "we are very concerned about being the company that drives conversations around games anywhere you can have those conversations on the web. We see ourselves as more of a catalyst than a destination," said Radoff.

Additionally there's a focus on delivering all that aggregate gameplay data back out to the community it came from. Through the company blog and via working directly with sites like the popular MMO blog Massively and game developer resource center Gamasutra, gamerDNA is taking those interesting nuggets of information about gameplay and behavior gleaned from statistical analysis and offering it back up to the community to make of what we will. At a sample size of the current 400,000 member userbase the company itself is quick to point out the data is a only small slice of a bigger picture — but nevertheless much of that data is fascinating to people who care about games (check out the analysis of levelling speed after the release of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King, a smorgasboard of Death Knight-related data, and a look at the relative popularity of games gifted over the holidays for just a few good examples).

What's next for gamerDNA? Ongoing active development of the Discovery Engine, for one. "Discovery is an essential part of our value proposition and it's something we're always going to be developing," said Jon. We'll also be seeing lots of enhancements to game pages as data is integrated from the original GuildCafe news engine and other sources. The corpus of games being tracked on the site is also poised to expand by as many as tens of thousands of games in categories including free-to-play MMOs, Flash games, web-based and casual games as well as social games being played on sites like Facebook. As well, there will be an increased focus on providing tools to get your data out of gamerDNA and make it more portable to other places online you care about, by providing things like widgets, expanded APIs and other methods of syndication of your profile data. Lastly, new features planned for the near future include the ability to allow visitors to buy, rent, download, purchase and/or play games directly on or via gamerDNA.com, which in combination with the Discovery Engine could be an extremely lucrative featureset for both the player and the company alike.

We've included the full text of the interview below, including an overview of the gamerDNA service, discussion about the value of openness and connectivity on the web in today's social software market, the importance of iPhone gaming as an emerging platform, and some advice to aspiring entrepreneurs looking to turn a passion into a viable business model.

 

Jon Radoff: The mantra of the company is to know gamers better than anyone in the world. What does that mean for us? We want to really understand everyone's tastes, what people like about games, and use that knowledge to connect gamers to other gamers like themselves as well as to new games they'd really enjoy.

When you look at the front page of the website you see some of that coming across, which is we've created what we call a Discovery Engine for games, and the idea of that is to find the games that are being played and enjoyed by people like you right now. So you can enter a game you like and we'll find the attributes that really define the gameplay within that particular game, and help  connect you with new gameplay experiences that you would enjoy most.

Q: And how many of those attributes are entered by players themselves versus how many are seeded by you or the developers and how they might perceive their games?

Jon: We triangulate on it from a few different directions. One of the ways it occurs is essentially crowd sourcing from our community the attributes of gameplay that people like. For example I could enter a game — let's choose a popular one that should be easy to understand, I'll plug in World of Warcraft.

The idea here is I go to a page now and we've divided the attributes of gameplay into 5 categories: the setting, the tone, who you get to play as, who you get to play against, and how it's played — the gameplay mechanics. We've found that those 5 categories really define what it is that people like about games most. And by telling us which aspects of the setting or the tone you particularly enjoy — it may be the PvP aspect of the game, that it's an MMORPG, that you get to fight against demons and undead — those set of attributes can be used to identify other games that share things that you might enjoy about it. So for example I mentioned that I liked playing against demons, so in the example here, if you like playing against demons you'll really  like playing Hellgate: London and Diablo and some of those types of games.

So this attribute means of finding intersections and interests between gameplay — that's one way we do it and it comes entirely from our community. If we go back again and I add another game, Fallout 3 — as you look at these different attributes like sci-fi and dark humor and so forth, these are just added by our community, so if I wanted to add something completely new, I could just enter that in and that will be added to the database of knowledge for that particular game.

What determines what attributes show up on this specific page — are these the attributes people have voted as most applicable for this particular game?

Jon: Yeah, it's the ones that have bubbled up via popular agreement, so it's much like wisdom of the crowds, as more and more people say the same types of things, those will be the ones we suggest to you. For example if I choose dark humor for Fallout 3 if that's what I liked, it'll find other games which may or may not be specifically an RPG-type game like Fallout 3. I might get something like Portal which it identifies for the dark humor aspect of the game.

So that's one aspect, but another aspect is the tracking of gameplay. One of the things we can do with gamerDNA is, as you become a member of the site, you can tell us which gamer networks you're a member of. So if you use Xfire for example, you can channel your Xfire play information directly into gamerDNA. Or if you've got an Xbox, we can connect directly into Xbox Live, watch what games you play and bring that information automatically into your profile. So we've taken an approach that's a little bit different than some of the other companies in the space, which is — rather than having a piece of software that you download, we have decided instead to extend the existing capabilities of the networks that are out there. There are 10 million plus users on Xfire, there's about that many on Xbox Live these days. We're capable of extending those capabilities on those networks, aggregating them all together, seeing what kind of games you play, being able to allow you to share that information about what kind of games you've been enjoying with your friends, with other people like you — and then using that information about what you're playing to find other types of games you might enjoy. It's this idea of discovery that I think is where we have made and will continue to make the biggest investments as a company because we think that the idea of having a place that can understand the tens of thousands of games that exist now, and be able to lead you into new game experiences that you'll really enjoy, that reflect your own individual tastes, as well as find the people that play games in a way that's similar to you — that's really the opportunity of something like gamerDNA.

Companies like Sony and Nintendo aren't nearly as open with that kind of activity data as Microsoft is with Xbox Live, but are you talking to those companies at all about bringing in some of that data as well?

Jon: We're talking to all those networks, and in some cases it'll happen at the individual game level before it happens at the network level for some of those games. So in the case of Sony PlayStation for example, there are specific game products that are very popular where you can get access directly to some of that information directly from the developer without having to aggregate at the network level. But you're right that some of the networks are farther along than others, and Microsoft and PC gaming in general and Xbox gaming are the 2 most notable examples of games where it's a lot further along than a couple of the other consoles. But we think they're all going to get there because there are so many advantages to allowing some of this gameplay information to be put out onto the web and allow your customers essentially to become evangelists for a platform or games that they love, which is kind of the commercial reason behind why gamerDNA is important in the industry. For the gamer it's share my achievements, show people what I've really enjoyed about games. For the game company, if you've created a great game, you want to allow people who've really enjoyed your game to share those experiences with other people because it effectively can help bring new people into a game product.

The other piece too is web-based games. And I often think in terms of what I call the 4th console, so people talk about Sony, Nintendo and the Xbox as the major platforms, but I'm a big believer that ultimately most good game content including what today would be called AAA game content will ultimately be available right through your web browser. And if that continues — and I think we're already starting to see that happen with some of the new multiplayer game content that's coming to the web — as we see more and more of that, we want to be a place on the web that can direct people and capture the aggregate of all this gameplay that's happening not only on the console but on the web. That's what gamerDNA needs to be there for, and we can bring people into a lot of these new game experiences on the web.

Where do you see the iPhone in that mix, especially as a lot more pretty awesome titles are coming out — do you see that as a viable new gaming platform that you might want to tie into the service?

Jon: Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt you'll see iPhone games become a part of the gamerDNA story as well in the coming months. We're really excited about the iPhone as a platform. I was one of the people who had an iPhone the first day it came out, so I'm a personal believer in the iPhone as a platform, and I think that it is in fact a good game platform. What's unique and innovative about the iPhone is it's the first mobile computing device where the interface can almost become whatever you need because of the touchscreen. I think at last count I heard there was 5000 or so games on the iPhone.

Yeah, it's crazy!

"If you played a game on the Xbox, if you played a Flash game in your web browser, if you played a PC game, we can look at the types of things that you've really enjoyed and help direct you real quickly towards games that you're going to love on the iPhone."

 

Jon: Yeah, I mean clearly there's a wide divergence in quality when you have 5000 games, but at the same time what you've got is a need for this idea of discovery that I talked about earlier which is, you've got this big long list — it now becomes really important to connect the individual game player with a game they're personally going to care about. So it's really hard to go through that directory of 5000 games — and who knows, it'll probably be 10,000 in a year or two — and that's where gamerDNA again can help a lot, because not only can we connect you to an iPhone game based on games you've been playing on your iPhone, but if you played a game on the Xbox, if you played a Flash game in your web browser, if you played a PC game, we can look at the types of things that you've really enjoyed and help direct you real quickly towards games that you're going to love on the iPhone. We're going to continue to build out for all the major platforms that are relevant for gaming. And that's a big part of the gamerDNA story is that we're not biased towards one particular platform. We want to really find those elements of gameplay that people enjoy across all the different places that you can play games.

So one of the things I mentioned earlier was the idea of sharing game experiences. I commented on how you can tell us your Xbox Live identity or you can use Xfire to track gameplay, so what you see on my page right here is some of the Xfire activity that's automatically pulled into my account. Part of gamerDNA is the ability to push that information back out into other places where you're communicating about games. So a simple way to think about it is that gamerDNA is connecting the networks where you play games with all the places online where you talk about games. And one of the things that I think makes us a bit different than some of the other kind of lifestreaming applications is that we found that most gamers we've talked to are not as concerned about synchronous gameplay and matchmaking type applications. Because the Xbox for example already has good built-in matchmaking and most PC games now have good matchmaking services in them, so we wanted to attack a different problem. Instead of it being a matchmaking service facilitated by gamerDNA, we really wanted to be more about the conversation around games. We want to spark people's conversations and get people talking about what they really like in games. So our approach as you see here from Twitter and both inside gamerDNA itself is this idea of rolling up the type of gaming activity that you've done, and rather than sort of spamming your Twitter with all the discrete events, we create the opportunity to have conversations around it. And I find that whenever these things go into my Twitter I'm getting lots of messages back from people asking me whether I liked the game and how I've been playing it and things like that which is a different use model than what we've seen other people attempting in the space.

And how important do you think it is for online communities in general and new products to support these other communities where other users already exist and where they already have existing networks? It's sort of a shift from the old world model of trying to get everything into this data silo, and the opening up to me seems like an inevitable trend -- do you agree or do you feel like that's important for online communities to embrace?

Jon: Yeah exactly, that's a great question. I think the structure of the web is undergoing some evolution right now, and it used to be more about being the destination site and driving all kinds of traffic into your destination. For us we're less concerned about being the destination per se, but we are very concerned about being the company that drives conversations around games anywhere you can have those conversations on the web. So we see ourselves as more of a catalyst than a destination. We want to be able to monitor the gameplay, see what you like, discover patterns, connect you to people, and spark those conversations all over. And I think that while the idea of a destination site is certainly not going to go away any time soon — there are still big big destination sites and companies will still continue to invest in the creation of new ones — I think that as a business model it's more scalable to create the things that allow you to sprinkle your content all over the web.

"We're less concerned about being the destination per se, but we are very concerned about being the company that drives conversations around games anywhere you can have those conversations on the web."

 

I think Twitter actually is a good example of a company that's done a great job of that. If Twitter were just a destination site, it might as well be a chat room, but what makes it interesting is the openness through APIs, the ability for it to work with multiple types of client programs, the fact that there are widgets you can plug into all kinds of different sites to drive conversations. I think that's a real advantageous business model as well as distribution model to pursue. That's what we're going to be doing and in fact that's what we've already been doing at gamerDNA by linking into things like Twitter, and you'll see us do more and more stuff like that as we grow.

It also relates to why we supported Xfire. Frankly if you roll back the clock to when we were first thinking about the company, it's sort of natural to look at Xfire and think well gee, isn't that a competitor? Because they have an instant messaging platform and do presence detection and they can knit gamers together. And we looked at it in a different way which is that, we didn't want to build client software, and they had already done a great job of that so why not extend that capability, and think of Xfire as one of many different pieces of software which could plug into an overall framework or distributed community for gameplay conversations all over the web. So our approach there again was openness and APIs and embracing the technologies that already exist.

You've talked a little bit about what some of the strengths are of going with a web-based model versus the client model. Are there any weaknesses of that model, and is there anything that you could do with a client that you can't do on the web or anything that you would look at as a compelling reason to make a client? Or is this a rigorous commitment to a web-based community?

Jon: I think there's a role for client software, so again looking at the Twitter model, rather than them building the clients they created an API which allowed people to plug into their environment, and they have basically crowd-sourced the creation of all those extensions to Twitter back out to the people who really care about it. That's our approach ourselves — we're not going to build client software, but we'll provide the environment, the APIs, the framework that allows anyone to interface in with us. And of course there's certain things you can do with client software that you can't do at this level of web technology, but the disadvantage of that model is that there's really just a small percentage of gamers today that are willing to download and install a piece of software, and there's huge disconnects between platforms as well, so you can imagine the problem that occurs when you're primarily an Xbox gamer for example, and you're basically told hey, install some PC software to monitor your Xbox gameplay. For us, we think of the web as a platform so things that tend to support the web and connect between the website and APIs we've created and other services across the web — that's really the way the best applications are built now and that's how they're scalable and that's how you make them accessible to the largest number of consumers.

[We continue along the tour aspect of the discussion]

So let's jump into a few things — a lot of this is evolving rapidly, we do builds on gamerDNA every week, so I'm actually showing you something that's going to change quite a bit just next week. But one of the things you can do within gamerDNA is that, if you're tracking a set of games that you enjoy, you can see all the other people who have joined the site today who have indicated a particular game. You can find other people like you who are interested in the same kind of stuff as you. The change that'll happen next week is driving more conversation around it, so rather than just notifying you of people playing games we also want to ask you what you thought about the game and have an ongoing conversation around all the games that concern you.

You can also explore and find games based on things you might be interested in. So earlier we looked at one form of discovery which is finding it based on traits that the community has labeled on games. In addition you can find out which games are most popular across the community, and you can find out what trends exist by people that are similar to you. So I play a lot of MMORPG type games for example, so I can see new types of MMO games and games that are most popular amongst the MMO crowd as I'm coming into the site.

 

What's driving the "games people like you are playing" box on this page — how does it know which people are like you?

Jon: Let me jump back to my profile and I'll show you. What we've done is in the guts of gamerDNA we have about 40 personality attributes that we track that denote the different types of gameplay that you seem to enjoy. The way we get at those are a combination of either taking quizzes, or just seeing what types of games that you've been playing. So in the upper right here where you see Tarinth's gamerDNA traits — it shows social, exploratory, etc. These are the different attributes that it has identified that I seem to enjoy. So for example the social scale for me is a bit above average meaning I tend to like games that are a little bit more socially-oriented. And over here with "reward-driven," I'm actually a little bit below average — in-game rewards don't seem to motivate me that much; I'm more about the social gameplay. It's these type of attributes we're trying to isolate as you play different games, as you spend more time in games, as you respond to quizzes we present to you. That goes into a set of personality facets that define you uniquely as a gamer. And your gamer fingerprint or your "gamerDNA" — that information is used to find intersections with other people. So then we find people that are most similar to your gamerDNA, and those are the cases where we show particular games that you might also enjoy.

Excellent, thanks.

Jon: And the last part is the sharing aspect of gamerDNA, which again goes back to this idea of driving conversation. GamerDNA is fundamentally about discovering who you are as a gamer, discovering new games you might like, discovering other people like you, and then having conversations around it. Like I said earlier, those conversations could occur on gamerDNA or they could exist anywhere. So for us, the conversation happens on Twitter or FriendFeed or another website — we're not as concerned about where the conversation occurs, we just want to be the catalyst that allows that to happen. Here you can see some of the networks we support so far. You can take your gamerDNA card and put it on other sites. You can generate signatures based on various personality quizzes that we've got. You can even create signatures based on particular character profiles in some MMORPG products.

And how much of the conversations are actually happening on the site? And how much of the original news engine from the original GuildCafe is still in operation, and are people still actively seeding that corpus of news and conversation?

Jon: Some of the old technology that was originally developed with GuildCafe when we were first prototyping the ideas behind the site are still part of the internal technology of gamerDNA just as we've taken a lot of pieces of 360voice.com which is the Xbox community site that we acquired last year. So a lot of that underlying technology still drives it. You asked specifically about news — we still have a news section on gamerDNA which is sort of a social news function. I wouldn't say it's a focus of what we're working on today but it remains a feature within the site. The way we see that playing out in the future is to reorganize the presentation of the news that's external to gamerDNA into the individual game pages. So just within the next month you'll see us revamp a lot of the organization of the individual game pages on gamerDNA, do some automatic harvesting of some news stories from external sites that allow you to link out and find things that have been written by bloggers, writers, professional journalists, big games websites and so forth. We're not going to be in the editorial business ourself, but we would like to be the place where people come through to find games that might interest them, and then if that leads them to places where conversation or editorial is external to gamerDNA, we've done our job because we've been again the catalyst for helping the person find games and game experiences that they'd love.

What was the catalyst for deciding to change the site from GuildCafe to gamerDNA, and what inspired that transformation and that vision?

Jon: It was really an opportunity for us. GuildCafe was great at aggregating lots and lots of big MMORPG sites together. But early last year in the winter, about a year ago, I ran into a guy named Trapper Markelz, and he had a very similar idea not in the MMORPG space but in the Xbox universe. And I got to know him and the two of us hatched the idea, realizing we're actually solving the same problem in 2 different markets, and both of us have recognized that this pattern exists in one case in the MMORPG market, in another case in the Xbox market — this is actually a broad problem for the games market in general. We came to realize that not only could we replicate it across lots of different gaming networks, we ought to also figure out a way to even recognize the type of gameplay you do on one platform and use that information to help you discover games in another environment. And out of those conversations we ended up merging the companies together and were able to draw on the collective experience in both the Xbox market and the MMORPG market to launch a brand new site, which we put up in the summer of last year — and that was gamerDNA.com.

And what's the response been in terms of feedback from the original community that was at GuildCafe and from the new folks who've joined since the new launch?

Jon: The vast majority of users that we have today are users that have only come to us since the launch of gamerDNA.com. Today we have about 400,000 users, and the vast majority of user growth has come subsequent to the new launch. And to this day we still have a lot of the early people from 360voice.com, we still have a lot of the early people from GuildCafe.com. Naturally if you undergo this amount of evolution — for us this was the launch of something new, not simply throwing a new skin on an old site — for us it was the opportunity to recognize these patterns across all different gameplay experiences but also to provide the definitive place on the web where you could capture all these stories and experiences no matter what game you play. And I think that for the majority of users of 360voice.com and GuildCafe.com it made it even more relevant to them because they realized that not only would it be a great place for the kind of things they had already been sharing with the community, but now it's part of something bigger — that no matter what game they play, their contributions, their identity within the community would be that much more valuable to them.

How far along the roadmap is the Discovery Engine? Is it mostly built and we're coming to the end of the planned lifecycle or is this only the beginning and there are lots of new features planned on the roadmap? How far along would you say you are on achieving that vision of connecting people with games that they might not have known about?

Jon: I think it does a good job at what it does now, and we have at last count last week 40,000 new attributes added to games in our library, so it's constantly sucking up new knowledge from our community. That said, discovery is an essential part of our value proposition and it's something we're always going to be developing. So for us it's a strong feature of gamerDNA and we're going to continue adding a lot to it. So even within the next month to 2 months you'll see a lot more in terms of bringing in more data points that channel you towards particular game pages, you're going to be able to get more customized information about new games coming into the market, new ways of driving conversations around games, all linked back to this idea of discovery -- looking at patterns and which games you play automatically. We're a very data-driven company, so the way we tend to look at things is we're creating this monster information resource with the database, with tools for managing the data, tools for mining and looking at patterns within gameplay and game experiences, and then finding news ways of presenting that information back to our community. So that stuff is going to be something we keep working on all the time.

So what are the various use cases for the data? Obviously helping users find games is primary, but within the business model too — advertisers would love to get their hands on that data, publishers and developers would like to get their hands on that data, the industry and the press would like to get their hands on that data — what's happening with that data? Where's it all going?

Jon: What we do with the information is put it back onto the website and just share it with the community because it's one of the really interesting things that we can put out there. I just jumped onto our blog to show you some of what we've put out there. If you go to the Market Trends section of our blog you can see some of the data analysis we've done based on what people are saying within the community and what people are doing within games.

The way we look at it is, we're passionate about the idea that we could help companies make better games. So if there's something we could learn from the way people are playing games, or identify types of product categories that are getting attention, and if there are ways to identify the types of gameplay that people really love most and use that to help inform game companies as to the way they can better invest in game products — it would be great to have gamerDNA play a role within that. But the primary purpose really is we're learning all this cool stuff, and gamers tend to love information about the game industry, about the games they're playing. They want to know how other people are playing the games, and what we do is we just put that information back out there for any person interacting with gamerDNA to explore and find out about it.

Just an example of some of the recent stuff here — we looked at how quickly people are getting to level 80 in the recent World of Warcraft expansion, we looked at what kind of people are playing Death Knights, we looked at the big hits from the holidays in terms of how long people were playing some of the new releases that just came out, we looked at the types of traits that are popular within subscription games. So we're covering a lot of stuff in terms of patterns and things we've observed both in who is the person who plays a particular game — what is that person typically like — and what kind of things do they like about games. And we do it in multiple markets — MMOs, console games, shooter games, strategy games — there isn't any particular bias as to the type of games. And one thing we've really discovered ourselves in this process is that the industry tended to have a lot of dichotomies in the past that defined gamers as, you're this hardcore gamer or you're a casual gamer, and we've really just learned that those kind of categories are unhelpful if anything, just because they don't really describe how people play games. And I think game companies are starting to realize that too; World of Warcraft for example embedding Bejeweled into the game is an example of breaking out of some of those categories and finding that gamers actually like and have more diverse interests than historically analysts and industry people tended to describe things. And we're finding that that's true all the time. And hopefully we're going to help illuminate just how diverse both gamers as well as game interests are.

Were there any other surprising trends you discovered once you started looking at the data?

 

"We were really surprised when we found that Bioshock was the highest game in our database that was correlated to Rock Band play."

 

Jon: I'd break it into a couple of categories. One is really having certain assumptions that we had validated with real data for the first time. So we looked at Rock Band versus Guitar 3; what we found is that Rock Band is actually driving more repeat gameplay. People were coming back to it day after day a lot more than they were to Guitar Hero 3. And really it was because of this trend towards more social gaming. People are not only playing games in front of their computer now, but they're using games as a reason to come together in parties and as a form of entertainment for groups. So that was exciting to see the real proof not only that it was a good selling point for the game but that in fact games, in this case Rock Band, that had those elements of being the catalyst for group entertainment — this was actually driving everyday gameplay.

So we saw that and one of the interesting things you wanted to learn next was what other games does a Rock Band player play? And we were really surprised when we found that Bioshock was the highest game in our database that was correlated to Rock Band play. Bioshock of course was a big hit but it wasn't the biggest hit of the year. You would have expected maybe Halo 3 or something would have been the game that came up — but for whatever reason Bioshock was highly correlated with Rock Band play and it's neat when you discover patterns like that that you didn't think would be there.

Could you talk a little bit about the Alliance network and what that network of sites is about?

Jon: The Alliance is third party sites — we don't own them, they're independently owned websites — and what we're creating with gamerDNA is the idea of a global gamer identity system. Just as we talked about earlier that part of gamerDNA is this idea of taking the conversation around games into other communities and how we've done that with things like Twitter and Tumblr and FriendFeed — we've also seen that there's this huge quantity of forums and enthusiast sites all the way up to the very largest big community websites around games. And we felt that there was an opportunity to create a framework for taking conversations and taking your identity as a gamer into those environments as well. So the basis of the Alliance network, which is a network that any game website can join, is an identity system built on standard technology — OpenID is the technology powering the identity system — which allows you to login to sites that are capable of supporting OpenID and it allows you to take your gaming identity into those places.

 

How many sites are in the network right now?

Jon: Today we've got 20, and in aggregate the number of people that interact with the Alliance sites is right around 5 million today.

And how much of a focus is on growing that network versus development of the Discovery Engine and some of the other features of the site?

Jon: A principal focus is building gamerDNA as a platform. So for us the Alliance is a way for other sites to participate in the platform we're creating. So we're not specifically going out there trying to recruit tons of sites and pick up traffic and eyeballs -- that's for other websites that really want to add things about gameplay identity and gameplay tracking. Again it's sort of like the Twitter model where we power an API and developer platform that other game sites can integrate with and share in a lot of the development that we're doing.

So it's just a technological grouping? There's no ad sales affiliation going on? Or, if a site wanted to join the network, what would they have to to be a part of that?

Jon: We do do ad sales for companies in the Alliance network and that varies depending on a particular site's needs but that's one of the ways we're able to monetize gamerDNA, like any game website, is through advertising. An advantage of working with these sites is it allows us to sell advertising on more than gamerDNA itself, so we work collaboratively with these guys. But unlike an ad network or a media rollup company the real emphasis for us is that underlying platform around taking gamer identity and sprinkling it across the web so that your identity, your profile, your gaming history from gamerDNA can be brought into other places.

I wanted to ask a little bit about the API of the site and which aspects are open to third-party developers through that API? And have there been any interesting projects going on with that API that you've seen?

Jon: Yeah sure — the main things are accessing game history, accessing which guilds you're a member of, accessing character information across games. If I go to the tools section and look at something like the Warhammer sig or the World of Warcraft sig — what these signature applications are really is example applications of what you can build with our API. So with an API key, which you can just get from your profile page, that gives you access to get at some of this information like your character information that's been aggregated from World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King, or gameplay information such as your experiences or history across different games and have a common interface across all this information. So people do things like widgets that capture your guild roster and that they've plugged into their individual website.

In terms of future developments for the site, I know you mentioned a couple of things like more developments around conversation starters and revamp for the game pages -- are there any other near features coming online in the near or even slightly farther out future that we should be looking forward to?

Jon: The real emphasis for us for the time being is going to continue to be discovery and the conversations around games that people are discovering. What that means is continued development at a few different levels. One is what you just mentioned which is continuing to enhance the game pages, make sure they're enriched with all the information people would want to find around games. In addition to that we want to make it possible to easily syndicate or access all of that game information both through standard mechanisms as well as APIs and widgets that allow you to take that content and build it into your own website, your own blog or take it externally. Then a big facet of our development is expanding the categories of games that we cover. So today we have pretty much all of the games that you'd consider to be part of the core gaming market, meaning anything that's been released on a PC, on your Xbox, on a PlayStation, even going all the way back to an Atari 2600.

Nice. I'm going to look for Pitfall next time I log in.

Jon: We should look for that! In addition to that there's a lot of games that are not really well-known or not well-identified both in free-to-play online games, free-to-play MMOs, Flash games, web-based games, social games being played in Facebook. So we figure there's several tens of thousands more games of that category that we also need to aggregate into gamerDNA. The 5000 games we talked about on the iPhone is another example of that. So there's a huge quantity of different types of games that we have to plow into the system as well and keep up to date.

That's going to be a big project!

Jon: Yeah, you'll be seeing a lot more of those. So here's Pitfall!

Playing against scorpions and snakes. Awesome. One last question on a bit more personal side: what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to turn their passion for something into a business? Are there any words of wisdom that you would want to give them?

Jon: It's really just "go for it!" and don't be scared of current economic conditions. In many ways that's the perfect time to start something.

Excellent, thanks. Any other final thoughts?

Jon: The main thought I'd want to leave you with is this idea that the reason most people go to most gaming websites today is to discover a new game that they'd want to play or to learn more about a game that they'd want to play, and gamerDNA is fundamentally about that discovery aspect of the gaming universe. It's about understanding you as an individual gamer, knowing what you really like and connecting you with games, as well as to the other people that play a particular type of game that you enjoy. That's what we're building with gamerDNA, we're passionate about it, we think that tens of millions of people need something like this and we think it can be a great resource. So far about 400,000 people have made their way to us, and we think that ultimately it's something that millions and millions of people are going to really enjoy and draw a lot of value from.

As someone who is both a gamer and a social networking nerd, I can attest to the value proposition here — it's been a lot of fun to hang out on the site, so best of luck to you folks.