One of the most memorable concepts that I’ve seen on VentureBeat this year is GameCrush, a site where male gamers can pay women to play games with them. Today the site is leaving beta testing and launching a new version of its service.
On the site, men connect with “PlayDates,” namely female gamers. They play video games together on the site — right now there are seven or eight casual games, but the PlayDates can also share games on their own computers. They can also talk to each other using webcams. If that sounds like your idea of fun, pricing will start at 60 cents per minute, which will be split between GameCrush and the PlayDate.
GameCrush said it was inundated with more than 10,000 sign-up requests in a single day when the site was unveiled in March. It let 10,000 users in, a mix of men and women.
The company demonstrated on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield in San Francisco today. One of the battlefield judges, Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, wondered whether this could become a forum for indecent exposure, as happened on video chatting site ChatRoulette. The difference, the company said, is that GameCrush users aren’t anonymous, and the goal is to build relationships between players and PlayDates.
