Tacter: A vertical gaming community - Part 1

I believe today’s environment is the ideal scenario for the next wave of $1B consumer companies to appear. Let me tell you why, and what's our approach.

I believe today’s environment is the ideal scenario for the next wave of $+1B consumer companies to appear.

The biggest existing consumer platforms have extracted until the last drop of value from their users. However, the enviroment is changing:

• Many have claimed that the Social Media Era as we know it is dead. Facebook is almost 20 years old!

• User data and privacy are not overlooked anymore. Now it's a legal battlefield distracting everybody from innovating.

• The creator economy has raised the user expectation standards for new generations:

  • Users have noticed the significant difference between the value they create and the value they capture in traditional platforms.

• Technological disruption is happening faster than ever:

  • Web3 Tech is disrupting the value capture and data ownership mechanisms. This is a massive hit for the defensibility measures of traditional platforms.

  • AI is disrupting the way users create and interact with content. This will change the whole value chain of digital platforms in non-expected ways.

⛈️ It’s the perfect storm for disruption.

I believe that gaming is the perfect niche to leverage this opportunity.

With 3.09 billion gamers worldwide (3.32B expected for 2024 source). A gaming company that seems niche can attract hundreds of millions of users.

Games have evolved to become primarily social. You do not play alone anymore. In particular, the younger generations (👀 how different generations interact with games)

There are already successful cases of consumer products that started within the gaming sector and are now expanding beyond, like Twitch or Discord.

Technological innovation always happens in gaming first (this is a thesis I will develop soon)

I believe there’s room in the market for a revamped idea of a social network for games, what we call a vertical gaming community.

We envision Tacter as a vertical gaming community:

• A place where players of different games hang out together.

• A place where experienced players can capture part of the value they created by playing games by sharing their knowledge with other players.

• A place that players use to discover new games, improve their skills, connect with like-minded people, or just have fun.

A product like this should showcase all the early signs of success of a vertical community (based on the vertical social networks thesis from a16z).

1. Users post things that they can’t (or won’t) share anywhere else.

Gaming is the perfect environment to nurture this behavior. Each game is like its own market with its jargon, memes, culture, etc. And gamers usually participate in multiple games simultaneously (Gen. Alpha playing 6 genres simultaneously on average). There’s room for a platform enhancing this kind of vertical gaming content.

2. Solves a core, utility-oriented need with a new tool/feature.

Similar to what Strava does for runners, Duolingo for language learners, or Substack for newsletter writers, this can be expanded into gaming. There are hundreds of utility-oriented opportunities in gaming, like coaching, tournament organization, game discovery, META analytics, etc. Many companies are going behind these opportunities, yet, nobody has succeeded in integrating a vertical proprietary solution.

3. Platform is a “system of record” for identity that enhances a user’s status within the vertical.

This is crucial in gaming. Games, in particular competitive ones, are continuous status contests.

Your gaming profile can be as vital for you as a gamer as the StackOverflow, or Github profile is for developers or your LinkedIn profile for your career.

And probably the closest thing we have for this is your Steam profile, which is not cross-platform, and barely prioritized for them.

4. Develops and supports its own group of platform-native “stars.”

There are already sub-platforms within major platforms where this is happening. For example, a YouTuber creating content only for Minecraft can perfectly out-earn most non-gaming YouTubers.

Of course, youtube already noticed this and is pushing forward Youtube Gaming with some custom tooling, but they’re just scratching the surface, and just for video-gaming content.

There are hundreds of content formats and interactions happening in every game. A custom vertical gaming community will be better positioned to compete with generalist approaches.

This is why I believe that there’s a plus one billion dollars opportunity for a vertical gaming community. And we at Tacter are going for it.

📝 EDIT:
This post has a continuation: Tacter - A Vertical Gaming Community Part 2