TEAMS.GG THE DREAM TEAM SOLUTION


If you think gamers already have avenues to find one another, the existence of TEAMS.gg might cause you to reconsider. Richie Shoemaker talks to its co-founder James Duffield on what might just be the LFG solution the industry didn’t know it needed


I


t might not seem like it when the number of people playing online games seems to be ever increasing, but finding kindred spirits to duel against isn’t always


as simple as many might assume. In ye olden times of course, the only option was to blindly charge into an online game and keep playing until you got to know people. Sure, social networks and platform-specific community features have made the process easier over the last 20 years and playing with friends once you’ve made them is easier still, but initiating first contact is still for many a fraught


38 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022


and potentially toxic process. For James Duffield it was while idling through


comments to one of his old YouTube videos that the idea for what would become TEAMS.gg struck him and his future co-founders, Tom Russell and Stuart Crouchman. The trio, a designer, backend and frontend developer respectively, had met in 2012 via a call-to-arms forum post when Duffield was looking for teammates to take part in a Call of Duty tournament. After some years attending esports events and making videos (which helped Duffield secure a job at Twitch), the three were increasingly keen to work together, but it wasn’t until discovering why one of their old videos had been a success that any future collaboration seemed likely. The video, a 2014 guide to finding a Counter-Strike


team, had slowly amassed 100,000 views, but what Duffield found fascinating were the hundreds of comments from gamers posting their age, experience and availability in the hope of receiving a response.


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