Last week, we were contacted by the purveyor of a new online gaming social media platform called Virtus Gaming. Drew Duncan’s his name, and he’s got a vision for the broader MMORPG community. “We want to revolutionize the gaming industry,” the email began.
I’m gonna be honest — I initially ignored Duncan’s email because we’ve seen so many of these platforms come and go over the years, from Guild Host to Enjin to ZergID, the last of which was one of our more prominent Kickstarter backers and has been in my mind the one to beat (and Massively-that-was used Enjin for a few years when it was run by one of the staff of WoW Insider). When I googled looking for more, I found a dozen guild hosting platforms out there I’ve never even heard of. Plus we have Steam groups, which have a built-in, massive userbase. Even my own guild exists largely out of Slack and Steam nowadays, and a lot of other groups are right at home in Discord. On the surface, it seems like we have a ton of options in this department already.
So that’s what I asked him — why do we need this one? What does it do that the others don’t? Duncan told me that he believes ZergID suffers from recruiting difficulties and feature deficiencies. Slack, he says, is a “simple” service that’s picked up where traditional forums left off but is ultimately one that we’ve “bent to our will” in the absence of something tailored to gaming. And Steam? “It’s a jumbled mess that is long overdue for an update,” he told me. “Steam doesn’t create an individual section for each title your community is involved with and as a result users have no way to schedule specific events or post unique discussions that other user’s might not be interested in.”
That said, Duncan was quick to assure me that Virtus “does far more than just manage guilds!” Part of the platform will function as an aggregator for gaming news and content precisely like the article you’re reading now. This is the kind of feature that makes me groan inwardly because I know such services usually take away from us — stealing our expensive content, blocking our ads, discouraging community discussion on our pages — but that’s more a concern to content-creators than to our readers, at least in the short-term. He agreed with my concerns and said that unlike a community like Reddit, where people routinely copypaste whole articles without attribution or linkback, Virtus will be more like Facebook for gamers without all the suck that makes it pretty useless to small websites and gaming communities alike. “We’re little guys ourselves and we’re aware of the direct issue that things like Google Pagerank have caused for the little guys hoping to build traction,” he said. Here’s how he explained this part of the service to me:
“Virtus Gaming is a site that is being built by gamers for gamers. It’s an online platform where the entire userbase will be made up of nothing but gamers and other like-minded individuals (unlike Facebook). As our audience flocks in to reserve their usernames and establish online communities that are made up of their favorite online games, they can also share and/or follow their favorite publications that use Virtus Gaming. Massively could have its very own page on Virtus Gaming (like you currently have on Facebook). It can be fully customized to provide a look and a color scheme that identifies with your brand (MO everywhere!) and it will even earn money off the ads that you have chosen to support on your page (targeted ads). Gamers everywhere can favorite your page to receive immediate notifications when new news is posted. Whenever your team shares news about a specific game on Virtus Gaming, every single gamer that has subscribed to or has favorited that specific game, will see a ticker appear on their newsfeed that new news has been posted related to that game. This means that anytime you make a post, your target audience will see it immediately even if they aren’t familiar with your publication yet. Better yet, every single guild that has a chapter that is playing that game, will also see that news article appear in that specific game’s newsfeed.”
Duncan hesitates to use the term social media, however, because Virtus is attempting to be more than just a blast horn. He prefers “online platform for gamers” and says he’s targeting more than just content-consumers and content-builders alike: Everyone from soloers looking for teams, publications looking for readers, indie dev looking for testers, guilds looking for members, and streamers looking for audiences will be accommodated.
In the interim, those interested can sign up to reserve their usernames already (there’s a raffle for a $100 Steam gift card ongoing now for those who jump in early), take the survey, and check out the design concepts on the blog.
We’d like to thank Drew Duncan for speaking with us and wish him luck with an ambitious project.
