Yeah, we manually choose games to support right now. It was a goal from the beginning to make it feel like you're immersed into your game's environment as soon as you create a team, which requires us to have metadata and assets for the given games. We do get feedback from users requesting games, and we have analytics on what people type into the game suggestions box, so we tend to pick up games that we're missing pretty quickly. I can see adding "custom" games in the future (similar to how Twitch eventually opened up to IRL-style streams), but probably not soon.
It's a bit of a tradeoff: like you mentioned, this does cause some users to leave when they see that their game isn't available. On the other hand, it does allow us to focus on building a really good experience for the games we support.
This makes sense! How will you evaluate whether a game is worth adding? Example: I went to add King Arthur's Gold, which is a mostly dead game (usually about 4-6 servers with population at a time). However, for my use case all I truly would look for it is in the scheduling thing. Can you add custom events/items to the "Home" Calendar regardless of the game? Like one not associated with one of the team's games on the sidebar?
Could you allow users to submit a game? If a user is interesting enough in using your system and having your game in the system, perhaps they would be willing to do the work to gather all the required information.
Obviously it would need review by your team, for various reasons, but it might be a viable way to get new games in the system faster, without being too much of a burden to the team.
I do think there will be a lot of interesting cases where we can crowdsource information (particularly around information like popular team comps, hero names, list-type things like that), and will be exploring those more for sure. The toughest part of that work is the image assets since they need to be done in a particular way, but it might be interesting to see how possible it is with some human-based Scale-like API.
I wonder if there would be incentive for game development studios to use Guilded?
I can imagine studios like Riot, Blizzard, or Epic signing up for a 'Studio' account. Part of what comes with that role is the ability to add their own games. So now you have a trusted source that could reliably do the game addition work for you.
The incentive for them is a great opportunity to interact with their user base and help foster a tight-knit community. I haven't thought about the details too much but seems like an interesting idea.
Im interesting in what your thoughts would be around that idea?
It's a bit of a tradeoff: like you mentioned, this does cause some users to leave when they see that their game isn't available. On the other hand, it does allow us to focus on building a really good experience for the games we support.