Introducing Product Hunt Games
Preemptive TL;DR: I’ve joined the team at Product Hunt to head up a brand new category for them: Games. It’s awesome.
I’ve been working in games media for over a decade. My last full-time job in the field, as a co-founder of Vox Media’s gaming site, Polygon, was an extreme honor and challenge for me, and I was thrilled to help build it into what it is today.
But, as I mentioned in my departure letter from Polygon last year, I eventually reached a point where I wasn’t feeling as challenged on a daily basis and felt like I was ready to try something new.
I spent the next several months consulting, freelancing writing and dipping my toes into professions that had always interested me. And yet, even when working in non-gaming fields, my love of games never subsided. I still ran weekly raids in Destiny, checked the App Store daily for games on my commutes and would ask my insider friends for recommendations on upcoming titles.
Most importantly, when I found cool games I loved, I would share them. Unfortunately without a site like Polygon, my reach was limited to my Twitter account. But really, it’s that sharing, the evangelization of innovative, fun, and sometimes weird games that has always been my favorite part of working in games media.
I frequently go back to this speech from my favorite Pixar film, Ratatouille. It’s the “defense of the new” that I’ve always clung to, heralding games like Journey or Johann Sebastian Joust, which push the medium to new and interesting places.
Product Hunt + Games
Earlier this year, I was introduced to Product Hunt and learned that they were looking to dive into Games as they had already masterfully done with Tech.
In case you’re unfamiliar, Product Hunt is a community-driven site where products (and games) are submitted, upvoted, and discussed by a group of passionate makers and consumers.
There’s no question that this same level of curation is massively useful for the gaming community, what with dozens (if not hundreds) of mobile, Steam, console and handheld games coming out every single day.
And while there are plenty of excellent sites that provide in-depth coverage of these games, as in Tech, Product Hunt will offer a focused list of killer games every day, curated by a community of game lovers.
Given my love of curation, it seemed like a perfect fit for me. And so I joined the team in April.
Just Getting Started
Today marks a major milestone, as we’re launching the open beta of Product Hunt Games (along with a major redesign). Over the last month we’ve had a small-but-awesome group of closed beta users kicking the tires and now we’re ready to start opening it up to the world. I’d love for you to check it out!
There have been some questions about what sorts of games we’ll be focusing on. My sincere hope is that the community (through submissions and upvotes) will begin to let us know the sorts of games they’re looking to see. But, to start off with, we really would love to see a focus on smaller indie titles, whether it’s a weird mobile game about a drunk llama or an even-weirder browser-based game where you feed a large, animated head. Board games, CCGs and gaming-centric devices are also welcome.
Bigger stuff will definitely appear, as well. Our audience is likely to be on the more casual side, so when major titles like Fallout 4 or Heroes of the Storm get announced or released (and look awesome), we still want a place for those on Product Hunt so that every can stay in the know.
But our focus is about surfacing the next cool thing — with the community’s help — that you can recommend to a friend or kill a lunch hour playing.
We also want to give game creators a platform to directly interact with our community through AMAs, giveaways and (eventually) internally produced content like podcasts and videos.
In the meantime, might I suggest that you subscribe to our daily Product Hunt Games Digest? I’ll be writing it each and every weekday, highlighting things that we find particularly awesome.
So that’s the long and short of it. If you dig finding and discussing new games, you should come chill with us for a bit. We’d love to have you.
