Hi HN! I'm Eli, the founder of Guilded (http://www.guilded.gg), part of YC's Summer '17 batch. Guilded helps online gaming teams recruit, improve, and compete.
I've been a gamer my whole life, and I made Guilded because I was tired of using clunky website builders, random recruiting forums, and Google Calendar/Docs to manage my teams. I thought it was kind of crazy that in a world where hundreds of millions of people play team-based online games, it's still hard to find the right people to play with, still difficult to collaborate on strategies and organize your team's schedule, and still hard to find the right competition for your team. Players are stuck with whatever tools the developer was able to fit into the game (often none) or whatever forums and game-specific and platform-specific tools have come along.
Guilded launched recently and is still in beta, but over the last two months, it's become the most popular recruiting platform on the web for Overwatch teams, and has picked up a lot of traction in some MMO communities as well.
I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions!
Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference to gaming guilds)?
I'm always amused by names rich in puns and wordplay, but at the same time curious whether they impede adoption at all through ambiguity. Then again, if it's primarily shared and mentioned through writing online, then that's probably less of a concern.
A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider picking it up as a redirect, just in case.
Apart from that, this looks impressively integrated. Do you integrate with Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag guild members with roles in Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People could connect their Guilded account to their Twitch account, and check a box like "automatically grant [mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders / people designated as global mods by the guild]".
Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for instance, tabletop gaming)? The team coordination, communication, and storage features seem useful for that, for instance.
> Is the name an intentional pun on "gilded" (in addition to being a reference to gaming guilds)?
Yup. It's a play on the terms "Guild" (gaming guilds) and "Gilded" (to cover with gold). This inspired the gold brand colors/identity.
> A quick check shows that "gilded.gg" is unregistered; you might consider picking it up as a redirect, just in case.
Thank you for the tip! Just grabbed it.
> Do you integrate with Twitch as well? Would be nice to automatically tag guild members with roles in Twitch chat, no matter who is streaming. People could connect their Guilded account to their Twitch account, and check a box like "automatically grant [mod/flair] to [guild members / guild leaders / people designated as global mods by the guild]".
Yeah, we have some basic Twitch integration right now. You can connect your Twitch account and it'll show when you're live and import your past streams. That's a great idea, though, and is something that I think is definitely consistent with the product goals.
> Is this focused exclusively on games you specifically support integration with, or would it work for other types of gaming-related groups (for instance, tabletop gaming)?
One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working on expanding the game catalog over time.
> One of my goals is to make it feel like you're immersed in your game's atmosphere as soon as you create a team. For that reason, we don't have generic game categories now, only explicitly-supported games. We're working on expanding the game catalog over time.
Fair enough. This is probably too far from your primary mission, then, but I will say that I wish there was a service that did what you do, for tabletop RPGs. Something that makes it easy to organize games, track character sheets and setting documents, provide maps, keep logs of events (including markers on maps), facilitate between-session communication and compartmentalized communication (GM/player), and so on.
I haven't seen a service that offers all of those things with good integration.
It might not be quite what you're looking for, but our group started using Roll20 recently. It has some quirks and is missing some spell data, but it is very customizable and includes online video chat. Think "Google Hangouts meets D&D."
I've used roll20, but I don't find it very useful for non-virtual roleplaying. I'm looking for something that integrates calendaring, drive, etc; meanwhile, video chat is not particularly valuable.
I've been bouncing a similar idea with the GM of my (sporadic) tabletop game and would be interested to hear more about what others would want in such a service.
Very cool. I have so much nostalgia for my gaming days and the connections I made with clan mates back in MOHAA/BF2/early TF2 times. Such great fun. You looking for any contract development/other assistance?
One random note - I don't think you need to post all those library licenses (on the About page) unless you are making modifications to the actual libraries. IANAL, though.
> Very cool. I have so much nostalgia for my gaming days and the connections I made with clan mates back in MOHAA/BF2/early TF2 times. Such great fun. You looking for any contract development/other assistance?
Thanks! I totally get the nostalgia (for me, mostly Age of Empires/SOCOM/Diablo II/DaoC/SC2), so I'm really enjoying being able to combine software engineering and gaming full-time. I'm not looking for any development assistance at the moment, but I'll note your handle down for the future.
I could really use a filter for Location (or better yet +-time zones). Finding folks to play with in the Sydney (UTC+10:00) offset is often a pain, moreso than finding a common game or platform.
This looks a fair amount like Guildwork (http://guildwork.com/), which I remember trying to do a fairly similar thing a few years back (but aimed more specifically at MMORPGs, I think). The founder of Guildwork is actually the CTO of Discord now. It's good to see someone else working on a similar idea, I think it's a space with a lot of potential.
Guilded looks really nice from what I can see while clicking around the site randomly a bit. Congratulations on getting it to the beta stage, it looks extremely impressive for something to have built mostly solo.
One fairly minor suggestion: I think it would probably be good to replace some of the screenshots in the carousel at the top of the landing page with more carefully selected ones. They're the very first "glimpse of the site" for someone new visiting guilded.gg, so they're the first impression of what the site will be like. And the very first thing they see right now is the Dota 2 screenshot with a large "So tired of laning with bads". Then it cycles to the WoT one that's also showing someone complaining. I think that just gives a bit of a negative initial feeling. Also, if Overwatch is one of your main focuses, having a screenshot in there with something more in-depth than "Overwatch RELEASE!" would probably help to show that off as well.
What's funny is I got rejected from YC with Guildwork years ago. After flailing around trying to make it work I reflected on why it didn't work, Discord was the result. :)
Ha, interesting. Glad to see you doing so well with Discord, I used to spend a ton of time on the BG forums back in around 2009 or so, and vaguely remember giving some feedback on the very first versions of Guildwork.
I'm a pretty avid gamer. I play Dota 2 pretty regularly, among manay of the other games listed on the front page. I'm definitely within the target audience.
I recoiled at seeing "So tired of laning with bads" plastered on the front page. If this is the kind of attitude I should expect from people on the site, I'm absolutely not interested.
I've updated the landing page, let me know if you think that's better. I shared with the Dota2 subreddit a while back and this is the first time I've heard that sentiment, so I hope we can avoid over-generalizing based on one satirical sentence.
Great feedback, thank you. Somewhat ironically in Guildwork's case, I think that the potential in this space has really increased in the last few years as gaming services like Discord (and Twitch, Steam, etc.) have built up robust public APIs that allow you to manage all of your gaming networks at a higher level. And yeah, I agree that the screenshots are in need of a refresh, I'll be taking a look at that again soon.
Cool! There's definitely a need for something like this. I played competitive Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one has successfully replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc communities of the time.
Griping: Massively unimpressed with the presentation and branding. Gaming has a ton of work to do to be considered a generally accessible and comfortable place for people of all form. In your hero image, two of your images show toxic commenting by people in the team channels and much of the wordage comes across brusque-y.
... "So tired of laning with bads"...
... "Map talk mittengard is terrible"...
... "Why do you want to join Rage Force?"...
... "You decide who makes the cut"... "Talent on the market"...
Look at Discord for an example of capturing the fun, whimsical spirit of gaming and exploration.
Guilded appears dark and intimidating. I am not at all encouraged to explore and my desire for play is far from stoked. In fact, this is the kind of energy that has sent me packing to the quiet confines of single-player gaming.
> I played competitive Counter-Strike in my youth, and one thing that no one has successfully replaced was the vibrancy and engagement of the irc communities of the time.
Yeah, a site called Gamebattles was the closest for me back in the day. I haven't found anything else that's captured that feeling yet, as they've largely died off. About the screenshots, we threw together those as parodies a long time ago and haven't gotten any feedback about them so I thought nobody read them, heh. I agree that the landing page copy could use another pass, thanks for the feedback.
Apologies for leaning into the negative aspects; the site struck a cord. I'm deeply, deeply passionate about gaming. I think they need a loving, gentle-touch and less of the hyper-masculine spirals of darkness.
May you use your powers of community forming to nurture comprehensive and accepting goodness and less in stoking the truly boring, raging fires of gaming negativity and elitism.
I totally agree. If you get a chance to try it out, let me know if you see anything else that gives that vibe. If anything, I've been wondering if the cute knight avatars everywhere and the bubbly GuildedBot dialogue make it a little bit too "cute" in contrast with the games' atmosphere, so I think the quoted sentences are just out-of-sync with the rest of the branding.
On the topic of the copy, as a former super competitive gamer / now super casual gaming dad, it definitely sent signals to me that this isn't a service for a casual gamer. Food for thought.
Honestly, I imagine recreating the IRC community of CS is never going to happen again -- also there are a bit of rose colored glasses here.
While it was obviously great, the majority of it was just idling in team channels and looking for group/pug/team channels. It was very centralized to IRC and needed then, but better "services" have come along and handle these problems much better, ie: ESEA, reddit, etc. A lot of these communities have come full circle now with discord being popular, and for many games you can find discord servers that emulate some of the CS IRC experiences of the past.
Steam/Valve should really take note, since the monetization end game for any kind of gaming user service (this, discord, etc) will be a game distribution platform.
Pretty interesting project and looks great! I see a platform filter; is this targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment? Any plans to setup a way to jump directly into a game with a group of people? I'm not sure how many games support this but being able to click a button to jump into an existing game would be pretty compelling.
Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).
Hope you don't mind the feedback! Good luck! These types of ideas are certainly interesting.
> is this targeting all platforms or just PC at the moment?
All platforms.
> Any plans to setup a way to jump directly into a game with a group of people?
Not yet, but I definitely think that's worth exploring. I think the first step in that process is to build the capability to know when your team is playing. Then, if everyone is playing except you, we can let you know that you can get online now and group up with everyone. That alone would be valuable for a lot of people, and if we could auto-join you that'd be even better.
> Love the recruitment and players LFG though a drop down seems like the wrong mechanic to me (would be pretty cool to be able to show game titles as like squares in which you could select as your filter (IMO at least)).
The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't scale to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On the other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority of the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't know what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons, allow search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.
> The tough part is that there are so many games to support that it won't scale to show every game, so some sort of search/typeahead is necessary. On the other hand, the most popular 4-5 games (I imagine) will get the majority of the volume, so it might make sense to have a hybrid approach if we don't know what game you play already (show most common 'n' games as buttons, allow search as well). I'd have to experiment with that.
Fair points. One strategy we've done is show the more important games _to the user_ first and sort appropriately (pre-orders, installed, played, etc) but that data is likely difficult to get, at least for a new user. But you could show the games they own / primarily use first and go from there and / or popular ones like you were suggesting.
You're a web app so drop downs are not as awkward as, say, on a console but I still try to see if there are creative but intuitive ways to avoid them :)
Looks pretty good (also considering it's mostly a solo effort).
I'd try to stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and features should vary greatly between them.
> I'd try to stay focused on no more than 5 games since guild requirements and features should vary greatly between them.
Agreed. Right now, I'm focusing on a few communities to make sure it works really well for them before expanding the feature set to all games.
What's interesting though is that all of the site's features - even the ones that look game-specific - cut horizontally across many games. For instance, we recently added an Overwatch team comp builder. It turns out that every game that has the notion of "balanced teams" can adapt that in the future, even if they're not even the same genre. The same engine used to generate Overwatch teams can be used to generate League of Legends, DotA, and Heroes of the Storm teams. This is something I'm really excited about in the future.
I'm really, really excited about this, especially once you expand to other games. I'm big on The Crew and Rocket League but am most active in Kingdom Hearts Union χ and our party is terrible at being organized when it comes to raid event scheduling. This could very easily solve that and integration with Discord (which we already use) makes onboarding a breeze.
One of my first startup experiences was working for a company that built aspects of this concept in 2007; match-making, server provisioning, and competition/tournament workflows. We licensed it to id for Quake Live and later Riot Games for what became League of Legends.
We failed for a whole bunch of reasons but love the idea. I think you have the timing right on this. Good luck.
This looks really cool (and I'm not a hardcore gamer) but avid Discord user for things like Zwift.
I'm curious: are there other use cases for Guilded outside of online gaming? For instance, on Zwift, you can join certain races and clubs, but it's really messy and happens primarily off their app (often in FB Groups). This seems like a better use case.
I think the concept applies to many domains, but Guilded is 100% focused on online gaming. It's definitely interesting to see Discord gain traction in non-gaming circles, but I'm not planning on venturing there in the forseeable future.
running a dota team with mostly full time job having adults means a lot of gymnastics around scheduling. Something that would be a game changer (that I didn't see) is functionality in the calendar for future availability/suggested times for events.
this type of thing would make us absolutely use the platform
Definitely! This is something I'm planning on building in the future. Not only would it make finding times for scheduled events easier, but we could also send you a notification automatically when you have a full team on (for example) to queue.
I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).
What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to run their group or charging game developers for integration with the platform?
> I'm pretty out of it when it comes to gaming but this kind of reminds me of Google Groups + Slack + GameSpy (assuming I understand how this works).
Yeah, that's pretty close. The main difference is that Guilded is less focused on solving real-time communication for gamers, and more focused on exploring collaborative tools like calendars, media albums, recruiting tools, and analytics tools. We integrate with real-time comms tools (like Discord) to make it easy to use both.
> What's the monetization angle here? Charging the guilds themselves a fee to run their group or charging game developers for integration with the platform?
Subscriptions for premium features, paid cosmetic features (think guild themes/skins, etc.), and sponsored events (using the integrated calendar) are all things I'm exploring right now.
Enjin was launched at a time when "website builders" were the only way to really manage your team, and that's still what it is today. A few problems with this approach:
1. I might just want to have a team calendar, and I don't really want to create a website to use a calendar any more than I want to create a website to use Google Calendar. You can create a team and access all the tools on Guilded in 10 seconds.
2. Enjin has poor mobile support as a result of this philosophy, because user-created websites on a desktop don't tend to work as well on mobile. They certainly won't work well as an app.
3. Because all of the features that Guilded teams use are integrated in a first-class way, we can do really cool stuff with your network connections, like share your updates to your Discord server, notify your team when you go live on Twitch, etc. Many of Enjin's are third-party html/js/css, so they don't have that level of control.
These problems are ones that I wanted to solve, and they were a large part of the motivation to build this.
This looks great. We're working on something at Tracker Network[1] that you may find interesting, but it's still pretty early. Have you got an email I can reach you at?
Thank you! I've been focusing a lot on Overwatch recently, I think the game and the scene is really exciting right now. It's just me, but a close friend did a lot of the design work, especially very early on.
I've been a gamer my whole life, and I made Guilded because I was tired of using clunky website builders, random recruiting forums, and Google Calendar/Docs to manage my teams. I thought it was kind of crazy that in a world where hundreds of millions of people play team-based online games, it's still hard to find the right people to play with, still difficult to collaborate on strategies and organize your team's schedule, and still hard to find the right competition for your team. Players are stuck with whatever tools the developer was able to fit into the game (often none) or whatever forums and game-specific and platform-specific tools have come along.
Guilded launched recently and is still in beta, but over the last two months, it's become the most popular recruiting platform on the web for Overwatch teams, and has picked up a lot of traction in some MMO communities as well.
I'd love to hear your thoughts/feedback/questions!