gamerdna posts

Launched less than two years ago, the gaming news and editorial site Crispy Gamer is now in the midst of a massive shake-up. As first reported by our sister site Joystiq, the company's board of directors has laid off the site's entire eight person editorial staff. There's no word on why the board made this decision but it has reportedly caused the company's CEO Chris Heldman to resign in protest.

Crispy Gamer launched with much fanfare in beta form in February 2008 and secured a total of over $8 million in venture capital funding. Last month the company seemed to be in the midst of expanding as it bought the social networking and stats web site GamerDNA.com. There's no word on what direction the Crispy Gamer company will now take.

Last year we did a feature on GamerDNA, a then new social networking web site made specifically for gamers. At the time we felt that the efforts showed lots of promise. Today GamerDNA announced a revamp of their web site that adds a number of new features for gamers to check out.

The new version still allows players to tie in their game interests with friends via using networks like Xfire and Steam. New features include a new personal homepage for your account. The Spotlight feature is up on top which shows things like new games that might interest the player via their past game activities. It also has things like community uploaded game screenshots, game videos based on your interest and more.

Below Spotlight is the Gamer Current which shows message posts made by your GamerDNA friends and to the right you can see what games your friends have been playing. You can also check out individual profiles of your friends which gives you more info on the games he or she plays and more. You can check out a YouTube video which goes into more detail on the new features after the jump.

Valve's head man Gabe Newell mentioned earlier this year that sales of their games tend to spike when they have price cuts on Steam. Now a new study seems to confirm that player activity for their zombie shooter Left 4 Dead has gone up for the PC version compared to the Xbox 360 port of the game.

Gamasutra reports that a new study from DFC Intelligence and the social networking site GamerDNA shows that player activity for both versions of the game were more or less the same until Valve held a 50 percent sale of the PC version on Steam in February. PC player activity went up and then leveled off but still was somewhat higher than the Xbox 360 version.

In late April the free Survival Pack was released for both platforms and while both the PC and Xbox 360 experienced spikes in player activities, the PC version went even higher thanks to a "Free to play" weekend that the Xbox 360 version could not duplicate. Since then the PC version has continued to be much higher in terms of player activity than the Xbox 360 port.

Our sister site Massively has been working with the social gaming network web site GamerDNA to compile data on players and their activities in PC games with an emphasis on MMO titles. The result is a new feature on Massively that shows the trends in player interest in various MMOs over the past year. According to their data (they used the gamer messager-chat service Xfire as their base) the last six months of 2008 shows that Call of Duty 4, Counter-Strike: Source, Guild Wars, and of course World of Warcraft were always in the top 10 list of games played by PC games.

If you enjoy pouring over stats than this feature has it in spades. According to their data, the launch last September of Warhammer Online took players away from Age of Conan both otherwise had little impact on the MMO scene. Head over to Massively to read up more about their findings.

GamerDNA began as GuildCafe, a social networking site dedicated to connecting gamers together and offering useful tools for clan management. Although there are popular social networking sites around, like Facebook and MySpace, few are specifically tailored toward gamers' interests. While GamerDNA still works as a social networking tool, its functionality has greatly expanded with the Game Discovery Engine, which officially launched on December 15th. Now, not only can gamers find each other, they can also find games that match each individual's personal tastes. The ultimate goal is to "know gamers better than anyone in the world."

Social networking groups are always trying to get new features to attract more users. A relatively new game-oriented service named GamerDNA just announced their plans for one such new feature, the Game Discovery Engine. This new feature will, according to the press release, recommend games to GamerDNA members based on their preferences.

GamerDNA members can input traits that they like in a game in the Game Discovery Engine which then recommends other games that are based along those traits. Think of it as a TiVo for games. PC titles as well as console games are supported by GamerDNA which earlier this year received $3 million in venture capital funding.