Forget the image of the lonely gamer in the basement rec room, spending hours playing an elaborate game alone. With the huge boom in multiplayer options, gaming is more like a college campus these days, where everyone is rushing around together and having conversations along the way.
But that environment can feel fragmented, believes local technology company
Echobit. CEO Adam Sellke says, "Believe it or not, the act of gaming can represent a fair amount of work. It's like downhill skiing without a chairlift; the skiing is fun, but getting to the top of the mountain is tough."
Gamers need to be able to manage their game profiles, find other players, do online chat as they're playing, and coordinate other tasks to streamline their play. Echobit makes it all easy with their product,
Evolve, which acts as an online matchmaking engine for gamers in the same way that Facebook aggregates content under single profiles and allows people to "meet" others who share their interests.
The company got kicked off in 2008, but has only been in open beta since the beginning of 2012. Word is spreading fast, though: since January, they've doubled membership for Evolve, and hope to have 100,000 members by the end of the year.
In addition to Sellke are two other co-founders, Soren Dreijer and Michael Amundson, and it's likely that they'll garner more seed capital and look toward hiring in the near future.
"As gaming becomes more and more popular, we all need for it to become simpler," says Sellke. "This is a way of connecting people, making gaming more social, and taking the management out of it so people can enjoy their games more."
Source: Adam Sellke, Echobit
Writer: Elizabeth Millard