I want a new cash gaming site!!!

[theartsyone]

I am so bummed the only two places that you can play cash games, where there is any real activity or legitimate business (more or less) going on is King or Worldwinner. Worldwinner has the single best online game created, scrabble cubes, but I am at the highest level rank so I'm pitted against people who actually know the percentage of the dictionary they have memorized or who know words that no normal person would ever bother with. It's no fun losing all the time--so that place is a bust as.

The majority of you who post on this site play at King and they at least add new games all the time, which if Worldwinner did they definitely be more compelling. But when I played on King they added a new game, the progressives were huge and then x-y-z would win and come here and whine about a mondo rank increase when they just won a hundred or more dollars off a $2 game. Of course, good luck withdrawing that with king reviewing your account for a month or longer. And then all the really good players who would take out hundreds of cup games at low rank and slaughter unsuspecting players for weeks on end. Then the RCs which are just for the best of the best. All thost top winner tournies--king's way of robbing the hell of you guys. Anyway, king has pros and cons but I'm banned there so that place is bust too!

Game Duell would be a decent place but that whole currency conversion is retarded--I've had money in my account there for like three years and I can't even tell how much it is!! And they have zero customer support for US players. Plus I think they were like banning a bunch of US players for making a withdrawl. Anyway, that site is crap-o-lah.

Funwin would be a cool site, but their jackpot tournament scores are the average of five games, and you must enter all five because it averages a total of five scores regardless. They also have a dice game that is just luck based (really, it just rolls dice and points are given for each random roll) so the site it more gambling than skill. Also you can't withdrawal via paypal--you can however deposit via paypal so I don't know why the reverse doesn't work but that flaw makes this site--poop!

And then we have the wanna-be cash gaming sites like the SkillAddiction now SkillVille that is a ghost town, uVme and that site with the pig as the logo--Rose games or something like but basically all of them are a mess compared to the two most popular sites making these underdogs--JUNK!

There are the sites that you can play for tokens/gems/jewels/points and exchange them for cash and prizes. There are tons of these sites, like gamesville, prizee, yacado, toilokdo and even Kadokado (which love because their games rock) but in the end, these sites lack the real umpf that just flat out playing a game and winning some cash has.

The final batch of sites are just free gaming sites that by way of playing games or slots, enter you into contests where you can win a cash jackpot. Now everyone knows, no one on planet earth wins these jackpots but pogo is like a huge gaming portal where you can do everything you can on any other gaming site except....win money. Anyway, in addition to pogo, there's iwon and another list of casual gaming sites which lure people in with the false premise of cash. And these sites--totally let downs...

So what now?? Will some computer techie-web/game-developer-geek pleaz hook up with me because I have a million ideas that need to be launched!

Note: I have no capital and dial-up internet connection, but it's all good right.....?

Happy New Year peeps--game on!

[Kworb]

I agree. More sites would be awesome. I think there's a huge market just waiting to be tapped. But it's so hard to get a new site going. There's so much work that goes into it before you can even accept registrations. And the most important thing is also the most difficult to accomplish; developing great skill-based games that are fun and addictive.

[msufan]

I agree. More sites would be awesome. I think there's a huge market just waiting to be tapped. But it's so hard to get a new site going. There's so much work that goes into it before you can even accept registrations. And the most important thing is also the most difficult to accomplish; developing great skill-based games that are fun and addictive.

I think the game creation is the easy part -- getting a sustainable base of customers that allow tourneys to fill quickly and build to sizable amounts seems to me to be the hard part.

[Jacob]

Development & software costs to start up a site are a significant barrier to entry for most people looking to creat their own site. For an infrastructure as thorough as King's or Worldwinner's, you are looking at the ballpark of ~$15,000 for development, assuming you are having your work done domestically in the USA. Creating a game from scratch is a project of its own, and if you want production value as good as the big sites you will need to spend some dough.

Would you guys be eager to play a skill gaming site which revolved around 1 game (for now)? I am done with grad school now, and always intended to get serious about creating a new site upon graduation. Perhaps I could prototype something, and get a game created that the majority of us would enjoy playing? (I'm thinking swapping, of course )

[msufan]

Development & software costs to start up a site are a significant barrier to entry for most people looking to creat their own site. For an infrastructure as thorough as King's or Worldwinner's, you are looking at the ballpark of ~$15,000 for development, assuming you are having your work done domestically in the USA. Creating a game from scratch is a project of its own, and if you want production value as good as the big sites you will need to spend some dough.

Would you guys be eager to play a skill gaming site which revolved around 1 game (for now)? I am done with grad school now, and always intended to get serious about creating a new site upon graduation. Perhaps I could prototype something, and get a game created that the majority of us would enjoy playing? (I'm thinking swapping, of course )

I'm in for a one-game swapping site.

Tip: make the game have enough luck to keep us all interested, otherwise GG will take all of our money in no time!

[msufan]

...and just to piggyback off of your post even further, it seems to me that the 80/20 rule applies here: 80%+ of the revenue earned on any site comes from 20% or less of the games. The key is ruthlessly eliminating the lousy games and just running a site with as few as 6-8, maybe 10 really good core games to keep things hopping.

[Jacob]

I'm in for a one-game swapping site.

Tip: make the game have enough luck to keep us all interested, otherwise GG will take all of our money in no time!

Yeah. Honestly, this site is probably not the best place to start a new site's playerbase off with, haha. And I agree with you about the 80/20 rule, especially for King. There are so many games featured which don't even have any of the playerbase participating in! Quality >>>> quantity, always.

[Kworb]

I think the game creation is the easy part -- getting a sustainable base of customers that allow tourneys to fill quickly and build to sizable amounts seems to me to be the hard part.

Well if we take SkillAddiction again as example, while I like their idea of letting other developers create the games and giving them a share of the profit, in the end they just ended up with a ton of games that were mildly amusing but weren't that fun to play over and over. To me at least. And people are getting more and more used to high production values in games, with all the Facebook and mobile apps that you have these days. It's expensive to compete with that kind of quality.

But you're right, even attracting people to the site is a difficult endeavor. And not just because you have to get the word out. Most people still don't trust "gambling" sites. In real life, no one ever believes me when I say I make thousands of euros playing skill games. I can show them my King account and my balance and they're still skeptical. Even my own mother used to think it's some kind of scam or pyramid scheme. Simply the act of depositing money to a website makes people think of Nigerian con artists. It takes a lot for a website to build trust. We've known Flignats from before he even started SA and even that doesn't stop us from wondering if his business is still staying afloat and if the withdrawn funds will ever be deposited.

[theartsyone]

A site with a limited number of games doesn't seem sustainable. Your games would have to be spot on and extremely popular to keep real player base. Worldwinner has that kind of setup comparing it to King that has tons more games but they aren't as globally popular as bejeweled or scrabble. In addition, with limited games (assuming they are really popular) you create a very small percentage of dominate highly skilled players who profit the most leaving the vast majority less skilled players who lose more but keep the site going. And targeting these less skilled players to keep playing one or two games requires not only enticing cash prizes but a super fun and highly-addictive game. A game that appears easy so everyone wants to give it a try, but it has a hidden level strategy that keeps you playing over and over again. If you got that ultimate swapping game Jacob more power to you, but I think the number matching/swapping games out there that have over-taken bejeweled--is none.

Honestly I think the more is more approach is better. Even if King has a pile of uninteresting games they seemingly attract their players with new games/features and not necessarily big jackpots playing already popular games. Obviously it's more behind the scenes effort to keep coming up with games but they at least don't have to be that "mega-popular" game that might not show up for another ten years.

And an aspect that hasn't been mentioned is the socializing experience that almost every casual online activity offers. I think if there was way to make a cash gaming site more interactive with live match-ups, how much fun would that be?? And I mean really giving that aspect a serious punch so it's not as simple as going into a "lobby" and playing a game pool--reworking something like WOW into a 3-minute problem solving game...maybe that is bizarro but it's like that's what needs needs to happen here--a skill base cash-gaming platform that is new and dynamic and makes gaming on king and WW seem like yesterdays news.

[Jacob]

I agree with what you're saying, and yeah...I think having just 1 game wouldn't be a sustainable website, unless it were super awesome & we had a constant stream of players signing up. Production value and replayability are what people look for in casual games; while the head honcho (King.com) has been good at producing high quality games every pop lately, other sites can't always manage to do the same.

From a business perspective, it's just a big commitment to have 5-6 high quality games to start out with on a site. One would need a significant amount of capital, along with the months it can take to formulate ideas into something that is playable & polished. I was thinking that perhaps a prototype could be made, using an amount of capital that I wouldn't need to actually raise from any investors, and take it from there.