As the popular misconception of the gamer-loner continues to break down, a number of companies are jumping in to provide new tools and services that connect gamers together in what is already by nature a social activity. We had a chance recently to sit down with Dennis "Thresh" Fong, once pro gamer turned Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, to discuss his new gamer social networking service Raptr and its goal to connect you with your friends in realtime as you play across platforms and genres. Follow the continued link for the full interview in which we touch on why gaming is an ideal cultural match for a social network, the cross-platform habits of gamers, and the value of aggregating your various "gaming identities" into a single public profile.

Q: As a gamer and a fan of social networks I've been using the service myself for a while now, but for our readers who might not know about Raptr already, how would you describe it to them? And what would you say the goals of the site are?

Dennis: Raptr is a free service that helps you connect with your friends who play games. That's what we try to do at the core — we want to help people to know when their friends are playing games in realtime across multiple platforms. Our ultimate hope is that literally any platform that games are played on, if someone's playing on it and you're a user on that platform, then you'll know about it through Raptr.

We are close to that goal but not quite there yet; the PS3 and the Wii in particular are two obviously pretty large platforms and we don't track the gaming in realtime for all games on those platforms. We do track some games on those platforms but we do that actually through the developers on those platforms and not through the platform makers themselves.

At the high level we want to help you see when your friends are playing games; we want to make it easy for you to join them. So obviously that's easier done on the PC, so when you see a friend playing a game you can click a button and Raptr will launch you into the game and connect you to the server your friend is playing on. On the other platforms such as the Xbox, if your friend is playing on Xbox Live and you see that on your computer, obviously we're not going to be able to help you get out of your chair and walk over to the console to log in, but part of what we're trying to do is also disconnect you from [being tied to] your computer in a way. In the sense that we've built in Twitter integration as an example so that you can get a Twitter update whenever your friend starts playing or if you want to send a Twitter update to your friends automatically we can do that too. That applies to Facebook and we've done a bunch of social media integrations on that front as well.

I would say last we try to help recommend other games that you might like because the majority of people out there don't know, for example, that Rock Band just released an AC/DC song pack. Probably 99% of the people who play that game don't actually know that, and we think that discovery — seeing what your friends are playing — is a great way to actually discover and find new stuff that you might be interested in playing. So that's at a high level what Raptr does.

We were going to ask about the PS3 and Wii linking. Is that because Sony and Nintendo aren't as open with that type of data as Microsoft is on Xbox Live?

That's exactly right. We've actually had pretty high level discussions with both companies. Nintendo is obviously concerned about privacy and protecting their audience because they tend to skew a little younger. If you've ever tried playing a multiplayer game on the Wii you know that it's pretty difficult.

What, remembering that 16-digit friend code? It's awesome.

Yeah exactly! So you have to know your own Wii friend code, you have to know your friend's Wii friend code, and you're playing Mario Kart so you need to know their Mario Kart friend code — they make you jump through a bunch of hoops on purpose so that's a little bit more challenging. PS3 is a little bit more open than that and again we're working with Sony to try to open up some of that data. But in the meantime we're working with companies like Red Octane who produce the Guitar Hero series, and actually that series of games is one of the games where we actually support both Wii and PS3 realtime gaming activity. So we hook in through the game itself instead of the platform. So we're kind of doing that on a game by game basis; obviously we'd prefer to just have platform-wide support.

"A majority of the users that are on Raptr play games on more than one platform."

Then, it's sort of not talked about but there are a lot of people playing games on these platforms that are flash games that have literally hundreds of millions of players around the world as well as some of the games on social networks that are pretty popular these days. That was something we really wanted to make sure we tracked as well, so we do track flash games. Actually in the client itself we tend to "bundle" a bunch of flash games in there. We tend to pick some of the more popular ones like Desktop Tower Defense and we've created an arcade section in the client to help people discover these type of things. From what we've found and what we've seen about the data on our users there's a lot of overlap actually between people who play flash games, people who play console games and people who play PC games. Most people who play console games don't know which flash games to try or which ones are worth playing, so that's kind of our way of introducing them to other platforms as well.

I think that's one of the most interesting features of the site. What kind of data do you have on what types of games the userbase is playing — you're saying there's a lot of overlap; is there overlap between the folks who are playing heavy FPSs and Call of Dutys switching over to play flash games or is it a lot of people playing MMOs, or is it a wide range of people playing a wide range of games?

We do capture a lot of interesting data. What we primarily use that data for is to feed into our recommendation engine to come up with other things you might like. For example if we notice you own Call of Duty 1, 2, 3, and 4 — well, when Call of Duty 5 comes out, we already know that's something you're going to be interested in.

Likewise we use your friend data as a guide as well. Maybe you don't own any of the Call of Dutys but maybe we've noticed that you played a couple of FPS games on the Xbox and we notice that 10 of your friends just went out and bought Call of Duty 5. That's another game that would probably be automatically recommended to you largely due to the fact that your friends play that game. If you look at a lot of the research, more than 60% of game purchases today are driven by friend recommendations or word of mouth, so we're really trying to tap into what's already happening and just make it a little easier by presenting it to you in a bit of a more user-friendly way.

Actually a majority of the users that are on Raptr play games on more than one platform. And I don't want to say that necessarily means that they're hardcore players, but I think it's because of the fact that we're the first service that actually can track everything. As soon as you install the Raptr client it immediately knows all the games you have installed on your PC or the Mac, and if you plug in your gamertag we know every single game you've played on the Xbox. Because we can actually track that data and we're the first ones to build a profile of you as a gamer on Raptr, we're able to see that we have really hardcore first person shooter players who play Who Has the Biggest Brain? on Facebook. And I used to be a pretty hardcore first person shooter and these days I'm playing Who Has the Biggest Brain, I've played Desktop Tower Defense — my tastes have shifted to be a little bit more casual and it's really interesting to see the overlap. People usually think of flash game players as being 50-year-old housewives and what we're seeing is actually that's shifting and there's a lot more overlap in these platforms than people think there are.

What does the data show versus PC gamers versus console gamers? It sounds like a lot of people are actually playing both but, you might think that because the client is PC-based you would have a heavier adoption among PC users because they're already sitting there at their computers anyway. Do you find that people tend to use the service on both sides of the equation?

So we have a client on both PC and Mac, but the Raptr client itself actually comes bundled with a bunch of different games. The most recent one that Raptr came bundled with on the CD is Call of Duty: World of War, which is the new one that just came out a few weeks ago. So every copy of Call of Cuty actually had the Raptr client on the disc. So by its nature, we have stronger distribution on PC titles.

But what's really interesting that we've found is that Xbox is really, really popular, particularly with our North American audience. I think our numbers show that at least 50% of our users have an Xbox, which kind of surprised me because I always thought PlayStation was more of the dominant platform. And certainly there are things that are skewed toward the Xbox which is that we track all the games on the Xbox so it's a little more useful to you if you're an Xbox player than a PS3 player. But there's a large overlap of people who play PC games and Xbox games certainly. And PS3 actually is very, very popular on our site as well.

On the Xbox or the PC or the Mac we automatically fill your profile — kind of like last.fm for music, but we're for games — where it automatically tracks your activity and adds the game to your profile automatically. On the PS3 of course we can't do that automatically because we can't access that data through PlayStation directly, so you have to add every game you own on the PS3 manually. But once you do that we have this thing, we call it "Manual Presence" which is kind of like your status update on Facebook. It's a dropdown that, as soon as you've added a game to your profile, you can say "is playing" and choose your PS3 game from the dropdown, select the duration and hit send and it will send a Twitter message or update your status, and that can be for the Wii or the DS or the PS3 or any platform.

You're talking a lot about, and we're starting to see a lot more of this sort of social media and web 2.0 meets gaming, with sites like Metaplace and Kongregate cropping up now and a lot of others walking the line between the two worlds. What do you think that web 2.0 can learn from gaming and vice versa and why is this confluence of these two platforms happening so much now?

What's interesting, and anyone who plays games knows this, is that gaming is actually a social activity. People who don't really play games or have a misconception of what gaming is all about think that you're basically being a loner playing alone in the basement, never getting out and never talking to people. When in reality it's really the opposite where, whether you're playing WoW or Warhammer or what have you, you're playing with a lot of different people. And a lot of times especially with MMOs you can't get a whole lot of things done without working with and playing with other people.

"More than 60% of game purchases today are driven by friend recommendations or word of mouth."

So in a lot of ways World of Warcraft is a social network, so I don't think it's actually anything new. And it's been the case for probably over a decade where, at least for me personally I used to play things like Quake, and I played Everquest, and a lot of the people I meet through these games actually become good friends of mine. Again I don't think it's anything new for gaming in particular, but what's happened is that a lot of people's online activity and their communication with their friends and how they keep up to date with their friends is now happening online. Facebook is of course kind of the obvious example of a way to find out if your friends changed jobs or how they're feeling or if they went on a trip or [are] in a new relationship or what have you. In some ways what we're trying to do is not necessarily marry the two so to speak more than plug their gaming lives — because it really is an alter ego, it's another world — into their real life world. Part of what that means is opening up the walled garden so to speak. I look at Xbox Live as a bit of a walled garden where, if you want to know if your friends are playing on Xbox Live, typically you have to go to your TV or your console, boot it up and log into Live, which could take a few minutes.

What we're trying to do — we don't even want to necessarily force people to have Raptr. We're just saying, "Look, if you play games on Xbox Live, and you're a Raptr user, just connect the Raptr service to your Facebook account and any time you're playing we'll just update your Facebook status so that all of your friends on Facebook, even if they're not Raptr users, can get value out of it because they can see that you're playing Gears of War 2 on Xbox Live, and they can go log into Xbox and play with you."

That's the main component of Raptr. The other component is actually our attempt to add a social layer on top of every game. We track what we call your achievements in a variety of different games. So in World of Warcraft it would be whenever you gain a new level, equip a new item, change guilds, change your spec, etc. So we do that for Warhammer and World of Warcraft and a bunch of other games. And we take those and publish each of those accomplishments as events to a newsfeed which can then be published from Raptr to Facebook or Twitter or what have you.

Really the idea behind that is to make the game more social because what I've found personally is that I could be playing Warhammer with a bunch of friends and we're all around the same level and work gets in the way for me and I don't play for a week. And when I log back in I have no idea what level my friends are at and I feel like I need to ramp up again; I feel really disconnected. That's why we've done that; we built that feature so when your friends gain a level or get a real cool epic item in World of Warcraft or what have you, you actually can keep track. You're getting this realtime stream whenever they're doing these things so you're not out of touch. Because what I've found is that a lot of these various gaming experiences can be really disconnected. What we're trying to do is connect them all and weave this social element through it all so you're never really out of touch with your friends and you can keep track of them kind of in a more passive way. So Raptr is proactively sending you and broadcasting these messages to you so you can keep track of your friends. That's what Raptr is all about; it's about adding that social element to games.

That works actually for games that are even not multiplayer which is where it gets really interesting. You take a game like Spore which is for the most part a single-player game, and we added this integration with Spore where as soon as you create a creature and name it, we publish it to your newsfeed to all of your friends that exact creature, the picture of it and the name of it, and you don't have to do anything and it goes directly to every single one of your friend's newsfeeds. That creates a whole new element to the game. For example we had someone at the office after we launched this feature who created a creature that kind of resembled someone else at the office and he named it after them and published it. He didn't say anything or tell anybody, he just did it — and a few minutes later all of us see it in our newsfeeds and we're all cracking up because it really did resemble him. And it got into this huge war where people were creating caricatures of each other. And that actually is not possible in the game itself — there's no easy way to do that. It's sort of taking that experience and applying it to all games. So what if you get a high score in Bejeweled and you beat my high score, and I get a notification that says "Barb just beat my high score and she's now ranked 1st out of 10 of all my friends." The beauty of that is it doesn't actually require the game developer to do anything. We can actually capture that data — as long as that data exists somewhere, we can get to it.

One of the things I find most valuable in my personal use of the site is that I have this aggregated identity of my gamer persona that unites all of these otherwise discrete silos and gives me a way to represent that to my friends. I find myself using the web-based features and more of the social networking features more than I do even the client and some of the cool features there like the automatic patching — I almost never think about it. Do you have any feedback from users on whether people are primarily using the web or the client and which features they're gravitating toward the most?

There's a few things — I think it depends on what type of gamer you actually are. Naturally the console players, the ones who don't play PC or Mac games, tend to use the website a lot more than they use the client. And that's just because there's less value out of it for them. The value of the PC client is that you can see when your friends are playing straight from your desktop. It can track your gaming activity and log in automatically. A lot of people actually care because what defines you as a gamer or the type of gamer you are really comes down to a few simple things, which are the games that you own, the games that you play and how often you play them. So people really do care that we're tracking their hours and their activity and when they play and we're showing it to their friends.

There are other components to the client which are forthcoming which will enable communication to be easier; so obviously some type of messaging between users. We recently added the one-click ability to join your friends with a single click — so if you do play a lot of PC games, particularly first person shooters and types of games where there are a bunch of different servers to play on, it makes it really easy to see your friend playing Battlefield 2 and you can just click his name and click join and it launches the game for you, connects you to the server that person is on and it does it all for you seamlessly. Certainly PC and Mac users tend to use the client more than console players. But the auto-patching feature is one that actually — if it's doing its job properly, you actually should never have to think about it. And that's really the idea, and even though I personally think it's probably one of the coolest features of Raptr for PC gamers in particular, the irony is that if it's doing its job you don't actually even think about it.

Are there any other future plans in the works for the client or the web services that will be coming online soon or further down the roadmap?

There are a ton of things we plan to do and want to do. One of the things we've talked about doing for a long time and are working on already is opening up Raptr as a platform. So that some of this data can be exported out of Raptr to be used in whatever way people want to use it. On the client side we are working on — and this is an often-requested feature — is instant messenging, so that's definitely coming down the pipeline pretty soon.

Are there any current bugs or problems that are being fixed or anything that's a common complaint you're planning to address and would want people to know will be fixed soon?

It's a long list! We're still in beta and we're still pretty new. Some things break and it's actually challenging because we hook into all of these different services and so sometimes it has nothing to do with Raptr itself, whether it's Twitter being down or Facebook's apps not working properly, or Xbox Live is down, or the data is corrupted — there's one game on Xbox that shows up as some other game entirely, so that's the data we're receiving, and when people play it sends out Twitter messages that go to their friends and they're saying "What the hell Raptr, I don't play that game!" And there's only so much we can do because we're relying on other people's data. That's why the client component is so critical for us because anything becomes within our control. If something is not working or not being tracked properly we can directly fix it.

What's the revenue model for Raptr? Is there going to be a subscription aspect to the service, or some sort of advertising bundled in at some point?

We don't intend to ever move to a subscription model. Our model is primarily based around advertising. The idea really is that because we're capturing such actual true data on our users as relates to gameplay, we can target ads about products that we know for a fact that they're going to be interested in — so we don't show someone who plays on the PC a Wii ad if we know that they don't own a Wii, for example. It is going to be primarily advertising-based; there will be some kind of what you call lead-generating component to it where we have channels on Raptr you can subscribe to. So a user might say "I can't keep track of all the latest free MMOs that come out so I just want any new free MMO that comes out to automatically download to my computer." So they could opt-in to something like that and the publishers of these free MMOs if they want to do so they can pay us to be included and anytime a new free MMO comes out and is pushed in to the channel, the users who have opted in can receive it. So those are two very specific ways that we can monetize this at some point in the future.

How do you think more niche and targeted to specific markets social networks like Raptr or like GoodReads for books or Snooth.com for wine or ASmallWorld.net for luxury goods will fare in the marketplace versus the larger more generic sites like a Facebook or a Myspace that really just want to taxonomize everyone in the world. Do you think they can coexist or will one end up dominating?

The reality is one is already dominating — Facebook is already pretty dominant. Myspace although they're moving toward more of a Facebook-ish model, is more about self-expression whereas Facebook is more about keeping track of your friends. There's definitely room for a gaming-specific social networks and for a lot of these other verticals. I think there's room for it but will Raptr ever be larger than Facebook? No. But the vertical has enough passionate users or people that are interested in it, that they'll find value in it. Certainly we wouldn't have created Raptr if we felt otherwise but let's put it this way, we didn't create Raptr to replace Facebook.

Particularly for gaming it actually makes a little bit more sense because you do have an alter ego when you play these games. People know me in gaming as Thresh, which is my handle, and not as Dennis Fong. And I think that's probably the case for a lot of people is that they have these alter egos that they go by. And a lot of games themselves are alternate realities; it's a whole different universe. So it makes particular sense, perhaps even more sense in gaming. I also think that a lot of people have gaming friends that are not their actual real world friends; meaning I have people who I call friends in games but I wouldn't necessarily add them to Facebook. So in some ways I believe there's a need for that in games because people make that distinction. Not all my friends in gaming would I give out my AIM or Facebook account to, etc. And I suspect that a lot of people feel the same way.

So the space specifically for gaming social networks seems like it's getting kind of crowded too with the recent acquisition of Rupture and the expansion of GuildCafe into GamerDNA and there are a few others. What strengths and/or weaknesses do you feel you have versus those competitors, and do you even see them as competitors, or do you think the market could be large enough to tolerate a lot of different sites like this?

Certainly they are all competitors. I think our strengths include my experience in particular in this space; I've built 3 startups in this space, most recently Xfire which for all intents and purposes is the most popular and fastest growing gaming community for hardcore PC gamers, which is over a million users now. And how Xfire grew is through co-marketing and distribution and bundled partnerships with game publishers and developers. So the type of deal we had where the Raptr client came bundled with Call of Duty: World at War brought a heck of a lot of users to us, and we never actually pay for those — we just come up with good partnerships on those fronts. And that's how Xfire grew and I was responsible for a lot of the partnerships that Xfire had with those game publishers and in much the same way we have a lot of these partnerships at Raptr.

And that's not to mention my personal experience and street credibility in gaming which is obviously very important; and I was the world's first professional gamer and I'm pretty well known in gaming circles as the kid that won a Ferrari when I was 19. So that certainly helps, and the team's experience in building Xfire previously, that certainly helped as well. We're the only company out of that group you mentioned that has a full-fledged client that does realtime gaming activity etc. GamerDNA has no client and they rely purely on other people's data. Unlike the other companies, because we have the ability to track stuff in absolute realtime, I think that's a huge advantage. One thing you can do is aggregate a whole day's worth of data — but if you get a feed message that says "Dennis played Call of Duty: World at War... yesterday" it's really not that useful. The whole idea is to try and help people connect and play games together.

To be honest I think that even though a lot of these guys are competitors, I think we're trying to achieve and accomplish different things. We actually focus a lot on the realtime aspect of gaming and helping people connect in realtime and play together, whereas with some of the other people it's more about a past history or an aggregate history of the stuff you've done. Will there be more than one a year from now? Who knows. I don't know but as far as we're concerned, we're pretty well positioned. We've raised over $12 million and I know for a fact that we're going to be around years from now because we have the runway to do so. So we were a little luckier than the rest in that we raised enough money before the economic downturn to last us for a long time. But how things shake out and what users end up glomming onto and what they find interesting — I think that's still TBD. We're all in the pretty early stage right now.

How big is the company right now; how many employees do you have?

We're about 25 people, based in Mountain View, CA.

How has the reception been since the launch? Are you happy about the turnout and participation and press level so far?

"One of the things we've talked about doing for a long time and are working on already is opening up Raptr as a platform. So that some of this data can be exported out of Raptr to be used in whatever way people want to use it."

Oh absolutely. One of the things we did was we purposely tried not launching with a ton of fanfare because we realized that it's a marathon and not a sprint. So we wanted to make sure we didn't make it seem like we're the greatest thing since sliced bread, and kind of let the users guide us in figuring out what features we build next. One of the things we're proud of is we really do listen to our users and we use their input a lot to help steer the direction of the project itself. Overall people are really liking the service and user growth has been pretty awesome as well. We have distribution into millions and millions of gamers that will be happening — it's already happened with Call of Duty, and we've got dozens of games that will have the Raptr client bundled with them over the next 6 months. I think that's going to drive a ton of users. If Xfire is any example, and this is how we grew Xfire, we're going to be in the millions and millions of users range in pretty short order.

We certainly wish you good luck. That's about all the questions we have — do you have any final thoughts or final worlds for our readers?

I would just say come try it out. If you like to play games, come try it out. We appreciate the time.

Likewise, thanks so much!