Player.me is looking to connect players, streamers and developers with each other to socialize, discover new content, and show off their favorite games. The social site launched last year with little promotional support, and the community has already grown to include 100,000 members. Now it’s ready to take things even further with today’s launch of the Player.me mobile app, which allows users to share and collaborate while on the go.
[a]listdaily talks to Sean Fee, co-founder and CEO of Player.me, about how the discovery platform will grow to bring gaming enthusiasts together everywhere.
What is Player.me?
Player.me is a social discovery platform for the gaming community. It lets players discover, share, and collaborate with each other, groups, developers, and even popular streamers.
Where would you say Player.me fits in among social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?
We are super focused on games, players, and the gaming community. Where other social media platforms revolve around connecting you to your existing network, we try to focus more discovery or connecting you to the people and games you should know, because your interests are so closely aligned. At the same time, Player.me connects to all of your existing social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Steam so we also integrate all your gaming friends from multiple platforms into one gaming hub.
How does Player.me connect content creators with potential viewers?
We do it in a few ways; our feed pulls in content updates from YouTube, Twitch, Hitbox and Beam so that your fans know when you’re streaming or a new video has just released. We also have a tab in our feed dedicated to who’s streaming now and we show you streamers that may be of interest to you based off your profile. Creators can also add their video content to game pages to get discovered by fans of a particular game. Finally, by connecting your YouTube account to your profile we automatically pull in all your videos and display them on your profile and if you’re connected to Twitch or other streaming services your stream displays front and centre on your profile when you’re live.
How do the new mobile apps enhance the Player.me experience?
Mobile is obviously a key cornerstone of any social product these days, and whilst a lot of products go mobile first, we decided to really develop the product feature set through the web app and then work to bring all of those features into our mobile apps. I think what we’ve achieved is an incredibly rounded and feature-rich mobile experience that allows players to discover, share and collaborate with other players around the world on the go. It really is the most advanced mobile social platform for the gaming industry out there.
What plans do you have to further grow the Player.me community?
We’ve been very pleased with the growth of Player.me, which has a community of nearly 100,000 gamers since we launched in mid-2015. But there are big plans ahead for the platform as well. To date, our growth has been purely word-of-mouth and we haven’t really invested any money in marketing because we felt mobile would be a very important factor. So we plan to work on some fun marketing strategies to supercharge our growth from this point on. We aren’t ready to discuss what’s next from Player.me just yet, but please stay tuned!
What would you say is the best reason for gamers to start using Player.me right now?
With the rapid rise of platforms like Steam, Twitch, YouTube, and more, the gaming community is somewhat fractured when it comes to social interaction and networking. One player may have a group of co-op friends on Steam, social friends on Twitter and Facebook, creators and streamers they enjoy on YouTube and Twitch, but these different networks can be disconnected and don’t always overlap.
Player.me and the new mobile app help bring all of this together into a central hub. We also feel that discovery in gaming is somewhat broken and that it’s hard for players or games to be discovered unless they’re featured on the big platforms. With Player.me, we plan to make discovery seamless and really enhance a players gaming experiences by introducing them to the right people, teams or games at the right time.
