GotGame

GotGame is an up and coming social platform for gamers that is being developed with hopes of connecting gamers to each other–basically, it can be described as Facebook meets AIM for gamers. Now, because there is currently no other service like this in existence, the rate at which GotGame will diffuse amongst gamers will be slightly faster due to the fact that GotGame is not replacing an older “technology.” However, that doesn’t mean that the threshold for adopting it will be zero–it just means that the threshold values will be lower.

This is something that the developers of GotGame realize. The first five games that GotGame will support will be (list taken from http://www.facebook.com/pages/GotGame/11489661980):

1) World of Warcraft
2) Call of Duty 4 MP
3) Call of Duty 2 MP
4) CounterStrike: Source
5) Battlefield 2

It’s no coincidence that they chose these five games either. These games are the most popular (and thus, have the largest player base) multiplayer games that are currently on the market. In other words, these five games form the five biggest clusters in the network graph of gamers. By choosing to target the five biggest clusters first, GotGame is ensuring that they will get a good number of users. Causing a cascade among the World of Warcraft players alone guarantees that a good fraction of the 10 million players will adopt GotGame.

Targeting big clusters such as WoW or CoD4 is a much better strategy than haphazardly targeting random clusters. After all, a cascade within WoW will yield much more results than a cascade within Hello Kitty Online. How a new innovation diffuses due to cascades within clusters is pretty cool–hence, I look forward to the beta of GotGame so that I can see first hand how a new piece of technology is adopted.