A new site is hoping to cut through that noise of endless Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube updates by bringing you all the stuff you care about through one news feed.
Player.me is a new social-media platform for gamers. It collect and collates updates from a variety of sources into one feed while also enabling people to follow and message each other. The site’s chief executive officer, Sean Fee, says he wants all kinds of gamers to use the site to communicate with one another and to promote their content. It enables gamers to connect their existing social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and more. Everything you do on those channels (as long as they are connected to Player.me) will appear in the news feed for anyone that follows you. You will also see that content from anyone that you follow on the service. This makes the site a potentially excellent resource for fans of major gaming personalities. You can follow the StarCraft legend Sean “Day9” Plott on Player.me, and then every time he posts a YouTube video or tweets something, you see it all in one place.
The site is currently in a closed beta test and will open soon to the public.
“We really want gamers of all types using the site, whether they’re pro gamers with an established fan base or just starting out,” Fee told GamesBeat. “The point of the site is really twofold: promotion and communication. For promotion, we hope players use the site to create their own beautiful one-page profiles to promote their content. For communication, given that Player.me aggregates updates from across multiple social platforms, it makes it the ultimate destination to follow and be followed. Users don’t have to log in to accounts across multiple different sites when they can get everything from their Player.me feed.”
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Even in its early state, Player.me already has a number of high-profile members. That includes professional e-sports gamers (Jaedong) and YouTube personalities (Seananners). Once Fee and his team start letting more people in, the company is expecting that tight-knit groups of gamers will use the service as a way to keep in touch.
“We imagine the personalities will develop a good following on the platform, but we definitely feel there is an opportunity for friends and clans to use Player.me as a discovery and communication tool,” he said.
Of course, gamers already congregate on traditional social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as hobby-specific messages boards and sites like Raptr. Fee recognizes that a lot of online platforms are looking to grab the attention of gamers, but he thinks that his site is doing something different enough to stand out.
“With Raptr and other gaming social networks, they try to control the users interactions and have them remain within their platform,” said Fee. “Player.me actively encourages movement throughout the multiple sites that players will constantly use. We aggregate these updates and in fact promote the external services that players use like Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, Steam and even possibly Raptr rather than trying to keep everything to ourselves. In this regard we consider ourselves more open than other gaming social networks around at the moment.”
With that strategy in mind, the company is looking forward to opening up and letting the rest of gaming in to try out what it built. Fee says the company plans to enable developers to create accounts of their own so that fans can follow studios and game products. He thinks this could especially benefit indie developers.
“Personally, I would love Player.me to become the ultimate destination for players to discover and share everything about their gaming lives,” said Fee. “The way we’ve built it, having all social updates in one place, we can become the best source of all information relating to games or players. We want you to use Player.me whether you’re a huge MOBA fan who loves League of Legends and wants to find out what’s the latest indie game that might be the next [League of Legends] or whether you simply want to find a new member to join your fledgling gaming clan.”
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