Gamer’s Hive: A unique story about gamers.
I want to tell you a story about a personal project of mine that became more than just a little pet project. I have worked on this product for over 6 years and I am passionate just as much as I was in when I first started. It’s my little baby if you will.
What is Gamer’s Hive?
Gamer’s Hive is the tool and place to showcase your gaming skills, connect with other gamers, and manage your team.
In its current state, Gamer’s Hive is a community of gamers from various parts of the world looking to connect with others. Gamer’s Hive will be providing tools for team managers to organize their teams, clans, or guilds and it will give gamers the chance to display their skills for other players to see and connect, or for team managers looking to recruit new players for their teams.
What started as a small side project to help me organize my clan, became a passion. Let me give you some history behind it.
Gamer’s Hive: The history.
About 6 years ago, I wanted to build a network site to connect with my friends outside of our games (organize parties, teams, etc).
While doing my research on how to build such a project, I looked into games that I played (at the time Ragnarok Online, and World of Warcraft) and talked to gamers that I played with and were part of my team (roughly 40 players), as well as, friends from other teams (2 teams of about 20 players each). I, then, wanted to see if I could build a social network that could potentially help me find others that could either join my team or join me on the different games I played at the time.
Once I started building and sharing my findings with friends and on gaming forums, I started noticing that others wanted to have similar things. They were looking into paying others to build them websites that they could use to manage their clans and teams. I never had to do anything like that because I could build my own websites.
That’s when Gamer’s Hive started becoming what it is today. I wanted to build not just a hub for gamers to come and meet, but a tool-set for teams who want to find new players to join their team and connect with other teams all across the world.
I started with a simple site that would be invite-only for my friends to come and test it out. See if this is something that would help us with our gaming and how we could make it better. Then after a few month, I decided to open it up and see if others would like to use it as well.
In 2011, the first iteration of Gamer’s Hive came to life. The main core features of the site at the time it launched, were the ability to connect with others and categorize them as allies or enemies. Allies were meant to help each other out in finding new players or conducting strategic planning for games, while enemies were meant as a way to have fun in a competitive environment. You could practice with your enemies to hone your skills in a particular game that you both play.
The other main feature that the site had was the ability to create “clan” (team) pages where they could invite people to join their team and manage those were in it, by posting news, notifications, or creating events.
When I launched the site originally in 2011, I didn’t think it would pick up, but by the end of the year the site had nearly 100 members and almost 30 clans had joined. The members were growing without any marketing. It as all word to mouth.
Around the middle of 2012, the site got hacked. The attacker was able to infiltrate the site and post files containing viruses on the server and corrupting all the data that Gamer’s Hive had on its database. It also affected 11 of my other websites in my server. I wasn’t able to recover it as I never had to deal with a hacked product. They were able to inject code via some queries that weren’t cleaned.
It is at this time that I realized that I have something beneficial for others out there, but the scale was going to be massive. I needed to rework it and make sure I would not get code injected into the servers again and risk of exposing any data or hurting other servers and other people’s websites because of my website.
When I started rebuilding the site, I wanted to see what are the main points that I needed to target in order to make this small project into an actual product. I came up with three.
- Identity
The site lacked an identity. Right now it was more of a functional site to help a couple of players complete some tasks in regards to their teams or friends. However, how could Gamer’s Hive be recognized, how can it post itself as a new way to connect gamers? Did it want to be just for gamers? Was it trying to be only for teams? Both? How should Gamer’s Hive look to the world? These were all questions I started asking myself in order to figure out what I can to generate a mission statement for Gamer’s Hive. - Security
The hacked site really put in perspective to me the amount of security that I needed to place. When I first created the site, I was coding everything by myself. I may had the skills at the time coding some smaller sites, but I didn’t have a very good grasp on how easy it is to hack by missing little things who now to me are common sense, like making sure all queries to a database are completely clean. I started learning more about security and searched for frameworks I could use that would clean all queries. It’s a continuous education as every day things can change. - Community
While the site helped create sub-communities by giving teams and clans the ability to generate their own small communities for their members, allies, and enemies, the site itself failed to be a community on its own. This was now a tool, not a community. I wanted the tool to be a beneficiary part of a big community of gamers.
In 2012, I closed down the site and re-worked Gamer’s Hive. I wanted to re-brand it and create a mission and goals for the site and the future.
The Icon
As gamers, we are all unique in our favorite type of games that we may play. We may like RPGs (Role Playing Games), FPS (First Person Shooters), or platform games, etc. However, we’re all still gamers. Whether you play board games, indie games, music games, or anything related to gaming, I wanted the icon to be able to reflect that.
The icon needed to be something memorable. Something to be able to represent the individual person inside a bigger community. I started only with six icons from games that I play. I learned that the community of gamers is far bigger than that.
I built a new icon after many iterations that I felt it truly grasped the concept of being a global community of communication and gaming.
The Tagline
The identity for Gamer’s Hive was taking shape. I wanted Gamer’s Hive to be perceived as the main location when it comes to teams and gamers looking to connect with each other in the competitive space. I wanted Gamer’s Hive to be the center where gamers can come and celebrate their individuality and connect with other gamers who share similar interests. That’s how the tagline was born:
Unique. United.
Two simple words that carry a big meaning for Gamer’s Hive. As gamers, we’re all unique individuals and we should be proud of that. However, we’re also part of a larger community. We are all united through gaming.
We created a marketing campaign to bring out the individuality of each gamer by making shareable posters, and an initial video exploring our new view.
While I was presenting Gamer’s Hive in an interactive show in Orlando called Orlando iX, I spoke and met with over 200 gamers who saw the site and talked to me about their needs as gamers. I even had the opportunity to speak with 3 team managers and a couple of pro-players and they expressed a big interest in being able to have a toolset to find new teammates and manage their own team. I felt like I was going in the right direction.
The findings were that as a gamer:
- How can I showcase my gaming skills?
- What can I use to find others that have similar gaming skills to me?
- How can I look for teams if I had interest in joining their team?
- What about other types of games? Board Games? Card Games?
The findings as a team manager were the following:
- How can I find new players for my team?
- What can I do to control the roster of my team?
- What are my options in terms of showcasing my team events?
- How can we display the skill of the members of our teams?
Building a Community for Communities
Because Gamer’s Hive is also a community we joined other social media outlets, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch, to continue building our own gaming family. We also created a blog to help others find valuable information when it comes to games, e-sports, or the community.
Rise of E-Sports
E-Sports is a growing massive industry in North America at a rapid pace. It’s not old. E-Sports / Competitive Gaming has been around since the 70s. However, shortly after E-Sports was minor in the US, while its popularity only increased more over time in Asian countries and Europe. (You can read more about the history here).
The E-Sports Industry is expected to be nearly half a billion dollars by 2017 and over a billion dollars by 2019. (NewZoo, Forbes, Fortune)
With Gamer’s Hive having the tools needed for new and old teams to have a central location to connect with gamers and other teams, we really have something unique to offer to the industry. Leaving us with minimal competition to bring new teams and new players into the industry and a more global market to the industry.
With the feedback from the OrlandoIX show and new information we gathered from the rise of E-Sports, I started the process of redesigning the gamer profiles.
The new profiles were going to focus more on the gaming skills of each individual gamer by introducing in the back-end connection to their gaming accounts, so we can pull in the data and showcase it in a new “e-athlete profile”.
Looking to the future
The future of Gamer’s Hive is still being written as the site is currently live on an Alpha Release for everyone to see and submit their feedback to continue improving on the product, including the creation of the new mobile app companions for the main site.
On all the years I’ve spent creating this product, I hardly have felt bored or not challenged by it. It’s a community that it’s generating has been one that I can be proud of. The site has now nearly 300 members, and many are active with our community providing feedback and helping spread the word around.
I have to give credit to Twitch, YouTube Gaming, and OrlandoiX for being the best way to get the community re-started, as well, as cultivating a more active member community. While I stream on Twitch the features I’m coding for the site, viewers become members who help continue to shape Gamer’s Hive by providing feedback or inviting others to join the site.
I haven’t stopped learning because I don’t know everything that Gamer’s Hive can be. If you are a gamer, please feel free to join the site and submit your feedback as you use it. Gamer’s Hive aims to be a new type of network. One created by gamers for gamers.
Visit the site, follow our Twitter and Facebook, Subscribe to our YouTube, and stay tuned for news on our blog.
