How to discover games online

Every year, more than 60,000 new video games are released on a wide range of platforms from PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and mobile. That is 7 games per hour. Tendency rising.

Human beings, who these games are made for are still bound by the limitation of time and space as they’ve been forever. Everybody gets 24 hours in a day and most have only a small part of that time available for leisure time and within that, an even smaller amount of time for video games.

And yet, more and more people play games.
And that’s the problem: Too much content, too little time.
A problem that humanity has been confronted with the advent of the internet on an ongoing basis. There’s an uncountable number of streaming services with so many shows you can’t all watch or keep track of. There’s a plethora of books being released every day that no one can read, and millions of interesting YouTube videos that you won’t have the time to watch.

The only solution to this problem is
a) to give up on the idea that you can consume all the content and
b) get recommendations that filter down the large pool of options to something that matches our needs

In the end, all we want is to spend our time well. Looking for the movie to watch can sometimes take as long as just watching the movie. That’s time wasted. On the other hand, video games are a much longer time investment. If you are ready to sink 100h+ into a game, you better research whether you’re playing the right one.

Enter gamebrain.co. Game Brain’s mission is to help gamers (and everybody is a gamer) to find the right game to play and allow for quality time playing.

For hardcore gamers that can spend multiple hours a day playing, it is important “bet on the right game”. If you level your character in an RPG and then the community fades away because the developer is not releasing updates, you might end up unhappy.

For casual gamers, finding a game is even harder because you certainly have even less time finding the game and can’t spend hours going through Steam, Epic, Nintendo e-shop, Play Store etc. to browse for new games. Often without any information on how good these games could be. Every store has different filters, some don’t know your preferences and show you pony petting games even though you are into slashing monsters.

Game Brain’s idea is to index all video games on earth, independent on platform, genre, location, etc. One place to come and find your next game to play. Whether it is for your phone to play something on your next flight, for your Switch that you can play on the couch when you’re friends are over next time, or whether it is for your single player time on your PC that you play for hours after everybody else went to bed.

We’re a small team and have been working on gamebrain.co in our spare time. We can call this project a success if users come back, build their gaming preferences, and really find something to play that they enjoy.

Our approach to achieve this has multiple entry points to discovery:

1. Semantic search: People shouldn’t only be able to find games by name (that would defeat the purpose of discovery) but search for what they might be in the mood for. E.g. “best role playing games of 2023”, “games with dinosaurs”, or “co-op playstation games”
2. Filterable browsing: Just like in a store, you might not know what you’re looking for until you see it. A good browsing experience should show you what’s available and allow you to steer your journey to get ever closer to what you want. At Game Brain, you can browse all 400k+ indexed games and filter them not only by genre, rating, or publish year but also by what other players have said about these games, e.g. whether they have “good gameplay”, “great graphics”, or an “epic story”.
3. Assisted search: When you don’t know where to start, you need assistance. Just like in a retail store, if you walk in and don’t directly know where you’re going, a friendly sales person will come and ask you some questions. “Are you looking for shirts or pants today?”, “Do you want something casual or formal?”, “Do you like colorful, or should we stick to black and white?”. The same idea can be applied for online game discovery. The first time a user lands on gamebrain.co — we’re sending them through an assisted search flow.
4. “Games Like”: Players that enjoyed a particular game, might be looking for something similar. Game Brain offers a “games like X” functionality that lets players in search for “games like elden ring”, for example.
   On every game detail page the player sees recommendations of similar games, offering one more chance to find something new.
5. Constant preference update: Games are art (some would argue the highest form of art) and art is subjective. Just like with movies, books, and music, there’s content that one person likes, and another despises. The more we know about the preferences of the players the better we can match games to their interests. It is therefore important to let the player update his or her likes and dislikes to keep telling the engine what to look out for when creating recommendations.

There are certainly more interesting and useful ways to help players discover games. We will keep looking and learning! If you have suggestions, don’t hesitate to drop some feedback.

None of these approaches is really new, what makes Game Brain unique though is the availability of these discovery avenues in a single experience that spans games for all platforms! Games will become more and more platform agnostic and we want to help players to find something to enjoy no matter what device they’re on.

PS: gamebrain also works with ChatGPT in a custom mode called gamebrainGPT.

Play on!