expanded is a recently added Events feature, which allows players to search for allies to join them in tackling live and upcoming competitions and seasonal events. “We want to keep supporting players, once they’ve


connected with the right people” says Duffield, when asked if TEAM.gg will ever expand to include tools for team (or clan or guild - insert your genre-specific collective noun of choice here) management. “We want to keep solving problems for them - things that don’t exist yet. We want TEAMS.gg to be almost the first place someone goes when they sit down to play. It’s the place they go to figure out who’s around right now, who they should be playing with, what they should be doing. It’s not how we refer to it to players, but to the industry it’s like the dream CRM for a game. That’s how we’re thinking of it right now. It’s a relationship manager, something that will continue with them even after the point where you connected with someone.”


TEAM OF THE CROP Having only been launched two years ago and worked on full time for barely a year, It’s obviously early days for TEAMS.gg, but with a growing number of users and recent developments - including recently being made the “official team-finder for Valorant in Northern Europe” - things are obviously going in the right direction. With investors sniffing around, however, it begs the questions as to how TEAMS. gg hopes to recoup its costs and start turning a profit. Duffield says his focus right now building up player numbers and improving the platform, but of course realises that


40 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022


TEAMS.gg has to become a sustainable business. “Areas that are really interesting to us are integration with


publishers, developers and esports platforms. Because the technology we’ve built now is connecting people together. And when those people play together, they enjoy their games more, they win more, they play for longer and more often. So we think that there are commercial opportunities there to integrate this tech into games, which is why it’s also so important to us that we can support any type of game so that if a game developer came to us and said, ‘we would love this technology in our game from launch’, that we’d be able to do that.” Another aspect that could generate revenue might come


from the responses users give to the questions they are asked when creating their profiles. “We ask some really unique things that even the game publishers don’t know. And these are things that can help those game publishers and developers improve game development, and can help businesses like tournament organisers reach gamers in the games that they support.”


LIVING THE TEAM With longer-term aims to help reduce toxicity in gaming and support matchmaking on Meta’s increasingly popular platform, and even help virtual concert-goers get together before taking in a show, the TEAMS team is certainly not wanting for ambition. Whether it has the resources to match that ambition and the reach the scale it to service a vastly bigger audience that it currently commands is another matter entirely. One thing’s for sure, Duffield and his two Call of Duty teammates have come a long way since a forum post brought them together, and they’ve certainly given the Counter-Strike community a more effective way to team up than their old YouTube video ever will. “Every time we hear someone tell us about a game that


they’re playing where they wish they had friends to play it with, we instantly want to support that experience. For us, it’s just a matter of time. We will get there. We are essentially creating a framework for connecting people around a common love and we’re facilitating them to do more of that together. That’s the dream for us.”


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