Soft launching Letterboxd/Goodreads for video games

This week I was finally satisfied with the state of the MVP I've been working on - my version of Letterboxd/Goodreads for video games.

Presenting to you Search to Play - a social platform for gamers.

I am a huge fan of tracking my media. I am a long-time Goodreads reader and I've been tracking my movies since 2008 - first on the service of my native country, then on IMDb and finally moving to an amazing Letterboxd from which I take a lot of inspiration for this project.

But more than any other media, I love video games. I've been playing them since I was a little kid, and I still play them. I also follow the industry/news a lot.

To give you a perspective, I was a magazine subscriber (when subscriptions meant something different) of the very first Russian magazine about video games. I was also a witness to an era when video game journalism was born in Russia too, watching very first reports from E3 game convention and dreaming to be a part of all of that. I’ve never become a journalist or even a game developer, but I wanted to still be part of the industry. So this project was born from my passion.

After a research on the landscape of gaming discovery and tracking, I concluded that there are no clear leaders in this area. Some projects exist, but they either treated as side projects or they’re not filling the gap I wanted to close. So I’ve decided to build my own, treat it like a business, and try my hardest to make it work.

After about a month of active building, I’ve managed to put together an MVP version that’s lacking a lot, but still has many basic features I personally want to use, and most importantly, have all the video games (that was quite an import).

Currently, the project is in the stage of searching for early adopters and gathering valuable feedback. Simultaneously, I am experimenting with the marketing channels I will be able to pursue for long-term growth. Such a project will be quite hard to properly monetise (since a big chunk of it has to stay free), and it requires a large number of users, so I have to think about a long-term strategy. There are also some potential challenges with user-generated content. But nothing that’s never been solved before, so I feel confident.

I am super excited to be taking on this journey and I love both working on and already using the project too (it's pretty awesome to have a profile on my own social platform), so I hope people will feel the same way.

If you’re reading this and want to give it a try (or share it with gamer friends), feel free to send any feedback or opinion you have my way or post on my feature request board.