“That’s when I spoke to Tom and Stuart, that


this is it. That this is what we should look at building together. That’s when we got our heads down” says Duffield. “We analysed everything that existed and asked, ‘why is this not working for people? Why are people still resorting to things like forums like I did ten years ago? How can we fix that?’ And that’s how we came up with this almost dating site-style, data-driven questionnaire approach.”


FIELD OF TEAMS Essentially, what Duffield and his team recognised was that gamers had different relationships with different games at different times. What they wanted out of Fortnite, say, might be entirely different to what they wanted from Counter-Strike, and their existing network of contacts might be entirely separate from one game to the next. So, instead of one profile for all games, players could expect one for each that TEAMS.gg supports. “When a player comes to TEAMS, they answer


questions about themselves. Questions about what they’re looking for in their ideal teammates. Questions like, when are you available to play? What’s your previous experience? What’s your future ambitions? When you’re playing with friends, how do you want to spend that time? These are all from talking to players within the communities that we support. We built an algorithm that takes all that information on board, and shows to them the most suitable players for them on our platform We’ve also made it very easy. Once people have


found the right people, once they’ve connected, we tried to make it as seamless as possible for them to get into the game, to organise time to play together, and to actually play together for hopefully for a long time in the future.” It’s important to note that TEAMS is not


intended to replace Discord communities or Steam groups, but rather compliment them. “All of these platforms that exist are really good at helping you jump into a game quickly with people you already know” says Duffield. “Our biggest USP is that you can meet people that you don’t know yet. Whether that’s because you’re playing a new game that your existing friends don’t play yet, or have chosen not to play., or players who have risen up the ranks and have overtaken their friends and they want to keep


August 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 39


driving forward and competing at higher levels, so they’re looking for teammates to do that. There’s a number of situations where finding a new set of friends or an additional set of friends for a game is really useful for players.”


TEAMSCAPE TEAMS.gg currently exists as a browser-based platform and supports just four games, albeit rather big ones - Fortnite, CS:GO, Valorant and, just recently, Apex Legends. Clearly the strategy has been to support the biggest games and drill down from there, which makes sense when the approach to each game has to be bespoke, and requires some degree of familiarity with it and its community. However, Duffield and the team is painfully aware that it needs to find a way to pick up the pace if it wants to support more than a handful of shooters, even if they do attract many millions of players between them. “What we are doing, and what we spent a lot of


effort on, is speeding up the rate at which we can launch in new games. We’ve spent a significant amount of time creating what we call the multi- game platform. It means we are able to plug in questions and take out questions. We’re adding these new questions so that we can expand to more types of genre and more types of game. The more that we do that, the quicker we can do it for other games. Once we’ve done a MOBA we’ll be able to do any MOBA really quickly.” In addition to expanding support to include


new genres and games (League of Legends and DOTA2 seem the most likely), the aim is to develop a mobile app, to allow for notifications for things like friend requests, as well as ‘play now’ functionality, which is a feature that would obviously play to the strengths of the platform’s team-finding capabilities. Also likely to be


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