In 2014 we set out to build a website to help with offline matchmaking for video game players.
This was a labor of love. A couple of us were really into multi-player gaming on the Xbox and wanted to have a social site where players of varying skills could locate other gamers of like skill and coordinate online games with each other. We were basically sick of getting totally owned by the kids that played several hours a day and wanted to play with people closer to our skill level, age, and status.
There were several game specific sites and apps that players were using but we wanted to build a framework to support all games on all platforms. Destiny was the big game at the time and one that we spent a lot of our time playing so we used it as a model. We were able to quickly fit Call of Duty, Halo, and all of the other AAA titles easily into the mix.
We did actually finish the site and it is still publicly available in a limited fashion.
The idea was sound and the market was tested before we started to build it. We did initial testing on Facebook buy putting out a couple of small ads to see if players were interested. We ended up getting around 300 or so likes in 2 days so in our minds this seemed like a great idea. We still get a few likes here and there but do not advertise or support the site.
We ended up putting the project on hold once Xbox Live came out with their own version. We couldn’t compete with Xbox because they had the profile and game related data to help drive player “likeness”. We had to rely on players manually entering their data, which wasn’t the best approach but was the only thing we could do at the time.
We built the site using asp.net MVC / Web API, AngularJS, JQuery, Ajax, etc. The notion of server side design-time data was used to help speed up the client side development, this pushed all database development to the end and allowed us to quickly iterate on the UI.
The site is still available with limited functionality for all to see here.