A referral system that let's users find games based on their particular interests. Since the domain of this project is video games, we must consider the people that are involved (stockholder wise). Some examples are gamers, streamers, ad sponsors, educators seeking to implement games into their curriculum, e-sports vendors, etc.
- Derrek Beeck
- Michael Kozak
- Justin Tom
- Hans Yabao
The domain of our program is buying related video games and looking for new games to watch on stream. The first part is for people who play a lot of video games and have specific tastes that are hard to find on their own. An example would be people who like Civil War strategy games. There aren’t many of them, so the average consumer may have trouble finding new ones, and this service could help them with that.
In addition to that, our service will also help people find new games to watch on stream. This is slightly different from the main part of the service which is to find new games to buy because what people watch on stream isn’t necessarily the same as what they play. Many people like to watch poorly made games but don’t want to play them themselves. This part will also find people who try to accomplish different tasks in the same game such as speed runs or high scores. The main demographic is going to be people looking for new games to play and stream and companies looking to host events to see what games are popular to watch at the moment.
Our business model is going to be based on ads and Amazon links. The program is going to be a website that recommends games to users. By using the website, the user will get targeted ads that appear on the website. These ads are provided by Google as part of the Google Ads program. We will get a certain amount of money per view on the website. Eventually, when the website gets more traffic, we can put our own ads directly on the website. This eliminates the middle man, so we get a larger portion of the profit. This can be a variety of products such as grooming products to soda and everything in between.
We can also advertise other games which can possibly make a lot of money. When a user looks for a game recommendation, advertisers can pay to make their game appear at the top of recommendations. Besides the ad-based model, there are other ways to make money. You can have a premium version of the website that offers no ads and more features. The price of one month of the service would make much more than the ads one frequent user brings in.
Also, we will have Amazon links next to the games. When a user clicks our Amazon link to buy a game, we will get a small portion of the profit. We will also enhance the user experience by giving the user incentives to come back to the website such as reviews, deals, etc. to help them keep up with the games they enjoy.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333075835_Exploring_Video_Game_Searches_on_the_Web
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15252019.2007.10722134
https://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol3no2-3/126
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/cyber.2011.0387
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2336747
The vision of this product is to create a service that recommend video games to users. We want to provide our service to people with a variety of game genres. These recommendations can be tailored to the preference of the user via user-controlled filters. The service would also push videogames that are deemed important to the user based on the user’s previous search queries. The way our product will be monetization is through ads and affiliate links for the business side of our vision. We are qualified to deliver this product because we have years of experience in front and back end systems combined and even more in interactive entertainment. Also because we have a lot of experience with types of video games, we are able to make good recommendations for games people should play even if they are looking to play their first game or a long time player.
Each game will have it’s own page with information pertinent to the user about related topics to the game. This will include critic and user reviews, new articles, interviews with the developers, a summary of the game, prices for different retailers, alerts for deals on the game, etc. The user will also have a homepage which will combine all this information but instead of 1 game it will be all the games the user likes or may like. The user can also choose to ignore games they don’t like or “thumbs up” games they have and do like so that they can get more games related to it.
When the recommendation system is moved to production, we want to make sure the base of the system itself is stable. The sole base service of the system is to recommend games, and we want to make sure that the customers of this system are able to be given that service in a high quality, highly functional fashion. In the future, through agile development, the system will evolve to include many new features. One of the features that our group wants to incorporate is to able to recommend other types of content that are themed/based around the topic of video games. Such media that we ought to recommend could include entertainment, such as TV shows, movies and podcasts or videos from the web.
Also, we wanted to focus on bringing more content to users of the system. Aside from entertainment, we also want to bring in more business and scholastic side to the recommender system. The system will eventually expand into recommending business articles where users of our system could read about what’s going on the world of video game development. Other things that it should recommend are academic journals about video games. For example, an academic journal that details the effects of one’s behavior during video game play is an enlightening article for a user that uses the system. These expansions to the system will help Gamer Zone grow into a reliable source for all things gaming.