An editor has performed a search and found that sufficient sources exist to establish the subject's notability.(August 2024) |
Type of business | Defunct |
---|---|
Founded | September 21, 2006 |
Headquarters | New York City, United States |
Industry | Video game industry |
gamerDNA Inc. was a social media company for video game players founded on September 21, 2006. The company was part of Live Gamer (Emergent Payments). [1] Members may tag themselves with information on games they have played, server names and guild affiliations, and use this information to find people they have played with in the past, or find guilds or other gamers to play with based on play style. [2] The company was originally funded by Flybridge Ventures (formerly known as IDG Ventures). [3] [4]
GamerDNA helped people discover new games to play based on their interests. The site features a number of tools to help game-players learn about what aspects of games they enjoy, including automated tracking of games on Xfire, Steam and Xbox Live; a database of games that locates games based on gameplay elements such as setting, tone and game mechanics; and quizzes such as the Bartle Test, which helps a player identify what aspects of game play they are most interested in—and then form connections with other players with similar interests. [5] [6]
The company has been compared to a Facebook and MySpace for online game players, [7] Some industry analysts have observed that social networks for online games are part of a new trend in which major MMORPG products are spawning secondary industries. [8] Also like other social networks, the service allowed members to form social connections with other members, and traverse the database of member profiles by these social connections or by user-defined tag clouds. However, the member profiles were geared toward the alter-egos that people play as within online games, [9] and supports the storage of game histories, guild/clan memberships, scores and profiles, and screenshots of game accomplishments. These features allowed players to maintain social contact with each other as they grow beyond individual games, guilds or servers. The service also allowed members to form groups oriented around their gaming guilds and clans, including features for event scheduling, roster management and private communication.
Jon Radoff founded the company in 2006.
Flybridge funded $600,000 of seed money. In April 2008, the company raised $3 million and changed its name from GuildCafe Entertainment Inc. to GamerDNA Inc. [10]
In April 2008 GamerDNA acquired 360voice, a service that generates blogs using Xbox 360 gameplay data using a data feed offered by Microsoft. [11]
GamerDNA was acquired by Crispy Gamer on 2009-12-16. [12]
In July 2011, Crispy Gamer was acquired by Live Gamer. [13]
A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game.
Xbox Game Studios is an American video game publisher based in Redmond, Washington. It was established in March 2000, spun out from an internal Games Group, for the development and publishing of video games for Microsoft Windows. It has since expanded to include games and other interactive entertainment for the namesake Xbox platforms, other desktop operating systems, Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms, web-based portals, and other game consoles.
The Xbox network, formerly known and commonly referred to as Xbox Live, is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery service created and operated by Microsoft Gaming for the Xbox brand. It was first made available to the original Xbox console on November 15, 2002. An updated version of the service, adding the Xbox Live Marketplace, became available with the Xbox 360 console launch in November 2005, and a further enhanced version was released in 2013 with the Xbox One. The service is used on the latest Xbox Series X and Series S and, in addition to a Microsoft account, is the account for Xbox ecosystem; accounts can store games and other content.
An online game is a video game that is either partially or primarily played through the Internet or any other computer network available. Online games are ubiquitous on modern gaming platforms, including PCs, consoles and mobile devices, and span many genres, including first-person shooters, strategy games, and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). In 2019, revenue in the online games segment reached $16.9 billion, with $4.2 billion generated by China and $3.5 billion in the United States. Since the 2010s, a common trend among online games has been to operate them as games as a service, using monetization schemes such as loot boxes and battle passes as purchasable items atop freely-offered games. Unlike purchased retail games, online games have the problem of not being permanently playable, as they require special servers in order to function.
Junction Point Studios (JPS) was an American video game developer based in Austin, Texas founded by Deus Ex creator, Warren Spector, in 2004. Disney Interactive Studios acquired Junction Point Studios in July 2007 to develop a property based on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character created by Walt Disney but owned by Universal Studios until the character was acquired by The Walt Disney Company from Universal in 2006. The studio was closed in 2013.
Marvelous USA Inc., officially doing business as Xseed Games, is an American video game company founded by former members of Square Enix USA. The company is currently a subsidiary of the Japanese game company Marvelous, providing the localization and publishing services for video games and related materials.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom for Xbox 360, Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 3. The game was released in Japan in December 2006 and worldwide in January 2007. Originally intended to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, it was later ported and released for Microsoft Windows in June 2007 and PlayStation 3 in February 2008.
Legends of Future Past was the first commercial text-based MUD to make the transition from a proprietary network provider to the Internet. It was designed by Jon Radoff and Angela Bull. It was also notable in that it had paid Game Masters who conducted online events. The game was originally offered for $6.00 per hour in 1992 via CompuServe, and then lesser amounts via the Internet, operating until December 31, 1999.
In-game advertising (IGA) is advertising in electronic games. IGA differs from advergames, which refers to games specifically made to advertise a product. The IGA industry is large and growing.
Boonty is a global supplier of digital distribution services for online and PC gaming whose technology platform and brand names were acquired by digital commerce provider Nexway in January 2009.
Jon Radoff is an American entrepreneur, author and game designer. His work has focused on online communities, Internet media and computer games. He is CEO and co-founder of Beamable, a Live Game services platform that enables the creation of online games based on Unity.
Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) is a United States-based non-partisan, non-government, non-profit organization dedicated to the interests of individuals who play computer and video games in the United States and Canada.
The Bartle taxonomy of player types is a classification of video game players (gamers) based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle according to their preferred actions within the game. The classification originally described players of multiplayer online games, though now it also refers to players of single-player video games.
A guild hosting or clan hosting service is a specialized type of web hosting service designed to support online gaming communities, generally referred to as guilds or clans. They vary from game server hosting in that the focus of such companies is to provide applications and communication tools outside the gaming environments themselves.
hi5 is an American social networking service based in San Francisco, California. It is owned by The Meet Group.
Bigpoint GmbH is a German video game developer. The company develops stand-alone browser-based games as well as social network games. Bigpoint has over 200 million registered users. Bigpoint.com states that 337,104,419 players are registered in the top right corner, as of 10/10/13. NBCU has featured some of Bigpoint's games on the websites of some of its cable channels.
Crispy Gamer was an American video game website that published news, culture, reviews, comics, and videos. It launched on October 26, 2008, as an independent website after being in beta for six months. Founding staff included former employees of Google, eMusic, and gaming website GameSpy. In January 2010, one month after acquiring gamerDNA, the editorial staff was laid off by the authority of the board of directors, with the company's CEO resigning in protest. The website continued to operate, with gamerDNA being acquired by Live Gamer in 2011. It was stated in 2012 that the website became defunct.
RockYou was a company that developed widgets for MySpace and implemented applications for various social networks and Facebook. Since 2014, it has engaged primarily in the purchases of rights to classic video games; it incorporates in-game ads and re-distributes the games.
Playdom was an online social network game developer popular on Facebook, Google+ and Myspace. The company was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area by University of California, Berkeley graduates Ling Xiao and Chris Wang and Swarthmore College graduate Dan Yue. In 2009, the market for games played on social networking sites was valued at $300 million, consisting mostly of online sales of virtual goods.
Playfire was a social gaming networking website targeted towards core video game players. Playfire allowed users the ability to automatically track their in-game achievements, trophies, and gameplay, as well as earn rewards for playing their games.