Ask HN: Holiday project feedback – Bashoto Arcade

3 points

11 years ago

I want to expand my main platform at Bashoto https://bashoto.com and I've got a few weeks of open time over break and I'd like to do something different, so here's what I'm thinking:

Pitch

Create local leaderboards with Bashoto Arcade to keep your players coming back to your game by competing with people nearby.

Product

An API for gamemakers to submit their top scores to similar to Google Play Game Services or Swarm. Scores are also submitted with a GPS location. Leaderboards are created locally and in real-time. So if I am playing a game, I see the top scores of people around me and can compete with them. If you had the second highest Flappy Bird score in your town, you'd play all goddamned day until you had the top score, wouldn't you?

Unfair advantage

The local leaderboards are not only a new game mechanic, they'd also be completely fucking FREE. That's right free.99. Maybe I charge for high-usage apps (100k+ scores/day), but I think I can build all this out and have it scale to ~10 million submitted scores a day for dirt cheap out of my pocket based on the tools I've already built out for Bashoto.

Why would I do this?

I want to use those the scores being submitted to create my own "arcade" app that consumers can use to see top games and scores being played in their area. The app turns more into a market place and I can charge for ads in the form of promoted games.

So I have two revenue streams

  1. High usage and popular games paying for the API

  2. Promotional ads in the arcade app.

And the value it creates for gamedevs for free is:

  1. Local leaderboards game mechanic to increase competition and replay value

  2. Geospatial game usage analytics (where is your game popular) 
     Here's a screenshot my current dashboard http://i.imgur.com/2BInRpU.png that would be adapted

  3. Exposure in the arcade app

Thoughts?