The world’s biggest video game fan site is going social. IGN Entertainment is announcing today that it has created MyIGN, a social network for game fans.
By adding a social layer on top of a web site that is visited by 12.7 million gamers per month (the larger network of IGN game sites has more than 18 million unique visitors per month), IGN hopes to adapt with the times and keep gamers engaged on its site for a longer period of time. You could call it the “gamification” of IGN, which will essentially create a meta game that rewards users for social behavior.
Peer Schneider, senior vice president and publisher at IGN Entertainment, said in an interview that MyIGN will let gamers earn social points for participating in discussions. They can write blog posts to get points and see their rankings rise in relation to their friends. They can also see what their friends are posting on a Facebook-like news feed.
Although IGN is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and its sister company is MySpace, IGN developed the technology for the social network within its own division. The home-grown effort allowed IGN to tailor its social network to what gamers want.
“We created it because gamers are not currently served by social networks,” Schneider said. “If I post what I really feel about a game on Facebook, I’ll get odd comments from non-gaming friends and family. In our setting, you can feel comfortable talking about gaming. No one else has nailed it.”
With MyIGN, you can follow certain editors at IGN like the ever-popular Jessica Chobot or game industry luminaries. You can get updates on your favorite games (IGN covers more than 60,000 of them) and tell your friends what you’re playing.
The company is starting with a beta test now that includes a news feed. At some point in the future, IGN will launch features such as matching friends in game matches. Eventually, Schneider would love to be able to offer instantaneous game demos or game purchases via digital distribution. (IGN’s GameSpy property currently handles matchmaking services, so the technology is already available). The most active members will level up.
So far, a small handful of gamers are testing the social network and they are engaging quite heavily, Schneider said.
“They are going nuts over this,” he said.
One of the main goals of the social network is to make it easier to discover new games through your friends and to reduce the number of clicks you have to do in order to get to the content that you want. There are rivals out there, such as Raptr, which has more than a million users. But this space is likely to evolve as companies learn to combine game fan sites, digital distribution of games, and social networking — all at once.
