Just a quick mini-blog on a topic I wanted to cover briefly.
So I read the article posted on the IGN front page about Game Crush launching their 2.0 design. Figured I'd write a few quick thoughts about it because frankly it both disgusts and interests me. Here's the thing, I understand why they're doing it because obviously there's a market for it. The site did well enough that they had to go into a closed beta for months before relaunching to the public. Obviously a business like this can be profitable for the people running it. But at the same time I question if those creators are gamers themselves. If they are, not only are they reinforcing the stereotype that gamers are pathetic but their exploiting that fact in order to make money off their own community. There's already a bad enough stigma that comes with being a gamer as far as public view goes, and this could only work against gamers.
As I said at the beginning of this post though, this site interests me somewhat. Not to log in and pay to play with gamers but a social site that appeals strictly to gamers. Granted we have My IGN which is slowly becoming a gaming equivalent of Twitter(and I dig it!) but social networking makes it really easy to meet new people and stay in contact with friends. Why don't we have any social networking sites where gamers can link up with other gamers of similar taste? It would be nice to have a network where we can combine the likes of say Facebook and Foursquare where we can link up with players in our area for multi-player games, Rock Band nights, Street Fighter tournaments, etc. Why is it that the closest we get to this is a site that's charging gamers to play with other gamers?
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