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Competitive Analysis
Most of the competing products share a similar base set of features. Below is a list of features to think about.
- User account Info: A username, Email, and Password
- Player related Info: Age (Birthday), Gender, Language, Server region, time zone, uses voice chat or not, platforms (e.g. steam, switch, psn), game library, in-game hours metrics (e.g. K/D, win rate, accuracy, etc.), available hours to play. A short bio.
- An account setup process to get basic player information.
- Friends: The ability to view profiles, friend-request, and chat.
- Search: The ability to look for players, groups, or events. The ability to filter based on specific info (often based on the player info).
- Groups: The ability to join a group, chat, leave a group and view group members.
Plink is a mobile app for finding people available to play for a specific game. At its core, the way finding players is done by a tinder-like card system. After choosing a game they want to play, teammates are picked by swiping through a deck of players. If two players like, they become friends. The viewed players can be filtered by things like platform, region, and game rankings. Most of this info is visible to at a glance on the player's card. If desired, a player profile can be viewed for more detailed information. Once two players match, they have the ability to chat. Friends can see if other friends are online and what game they are playing. Players can also join squads, which practically means a large group chat. Players enter their details when they first launch the app. Overall Pling is centered around finding a specific teammate for a specific game.
Noobly is another mobile app for finding teammates that uses the basic same card-based concept and overall structure as plink. The notable difference is the ability to filter players by their gaming schedule.
GameTree is a network for players to connect over games. The website is mainly focused around finding people to play with, but also has a simple post system where people can post about a game. The matchmaking system uses the same card concept as Plink. The notable feature is the ability to so called ability to find and filter players by their so called Gamer DNA. A player's Gamer DNA is a list of the particular aspects of games they enjoy. This is determined by a quiz players can take that asks the player to rank a statement from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
Guilded is a discord knockoff, with the notable feature of being able to schedule events. Each game is a discord-like server that you join for the ability to chat.
GamerLInk is a mobile app focused around finding teammates for gamers to play with. The app is focused around Posts. Players can create Posts to request for specific types of other players to play with them. For instance, a Post can be for three Rocket League players who play on switch and are above Bronze II. Posts details are game specific, and you can only view posts for one game at a time. Players can "join" a post to access a group chat with the other post members looking to play.
Team finder is a mainly a service for e-sports players looking for a team to become a committed member of. Practically, this means that beyond the common basic filters, searches can be refined with game specific filters such as class type, rank, or game mode based on what players a team is looking for. Here are some of the options for filtering a search for teams in the sidebar. The search results for finding teams are a list of posts with a short bio, contact details, general information, and game specific details. Notably, there is no in app communication, simply a link to discord. Also, Users can search for players in the same way. The player posts are similar.
Unblind is a app for finding friends with similar interests. Users can find or create local meet ups based on what types of activates they are into. The selection system uses a tag system to find events as opposed to a personality driven system to find users.
A key design decision to think about is what are users actually searching for? Is it events? Players for a particular game? New Friends with similar tastes? Teams? The post system from GamerLink I found to be compelling because you are finding a play style, not specifically a person or a team. You are not evaluating if specific players are good teammates, but if their play style matches your request. This allows for the flexibility of finding groups or players with one system. Choosing to design a match making system to support players and teams, or just players, or just teams is a key design decision we must make. This choice will cause a ripple effect and dictate many other aspects of our design. For instance, the standard tinder-like card system is focused on finding one particular player for one particular game and learning about the players stats.
Another key design decision we must make is if players are looking for people to play with immediately, or in general. This will dictate if we may need a calendar availability feature or if we only search for online users. If, say, we choose to focus on finding people immediately, then only games with larger player bases will be possible due to player availability. We would then need to offer better matchmaking than the default in-game search engine. Practically this would imply granular searching for other players based on their in-game stats which would requite manual integration with major games with unique UI elements to support it. One major problem for new users looking for players, is that for new users an onboarding process is needed for a player to setup their account which takes time. This would be in competition with the immediate, seamless nature of in-game match making. One possibility to keep the scope reasonably small could be to find a game with very poor in-game match making, and designing our service around that particular game.
Lastly, is this tinder, or a search engine. Are players shown potential matches based on an algorithm and choose from a list, or do they search themselves based on a large array of search options?