Social Gaming Guild

Why We Are Here
Social Gaming Guild is a New York City based startup aimed at developing and organizing the eSports community. At Social Gaming Guild, we believe the toxic community which plagues publishers, platforms and games is the direct result of a lack of accountability, transparency, and incentives to act in accordance with social norms and to work together as a team. Social Gaming Guild plans to build social infrastructure which rewards good teamwork and sportsmanship and thereby provides a source of high quality teammates.

The Problem We've Identified
We've been conducting face-to-face user interviews covering the following topics: why users play eSports; whether users play with friends made in person, friends made online or alone; the user’s interest in joining a team; the existing eSport social platforms; the user’s frustrations with eSports; and the user’s current solutions to these frustrations. From these interviews, we discovered the biggest problem was the “toxic community” that plagues all publishers, platforms and games in the eSports space.

When we asked interview participants to define what makes an eSports community toxic, here are the problems they cited: lack of communication between players, lack of teamwork, lack of accountability between players, no incentive to develop lasting relationships, no incentive to work together besides winning a game with little to no rewards, no ability to meet new players, no ability to retain/develop relationships, no ability to coordinate schedules with friends who play, no ability to see which friends play eSports, racism, sexism, homophobia, lack of patience, genuine assholes, no reward for helping players develop, no teachers, trolls, no courtesy, no social support or infrastructure, not enough balance in skill during matchmaking, people forget to have fun, noobs, no place to get together in person or online, stigma attached to gaming, people that play these games are socially weird, difficult when friends play on different platforms/publishers/games, leavers, only want to play with friends from real life, don’t understand how the player reporting and commending system works.
All the problems listed above result from a lack of player transparency, accountability, and incentives.

Market Size
- More people watch video gaming content than HBO, Netflix, Hulu and ESPN combined.
- March 2017, Intel Extreme Masters in Katowice, Poland had 173,000 attendees. The largest Superbowl attendance was just under 104,000.
- We've also done a back of the envelope, bottom-up market sizing. Happy to talk about it over an interview.

Solution
We have a relatively detailed solution outlined including wireframes.

(More information available upon request.)