After seven years in beta GamerDating.com, the world’s first dating site dedicated to gamers, formally launches, the first dating site to allow single gamers to match one another with twinned dating and gaming profiles of PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo games.
“We’ve taken our time to make sure the service was the best available,” said GamerDating’s Founder James Palmer. “Without any marketing and publicity, 360,000 single gamers have already signed up – and another 20,000 are joining every month. We’re clocking more than 90,000 messages a week are being sent between our beta users” The elegant product design and ability to add and search games within users profiles being the main reasons the founders think the site is a hit. “We’re happily saying to gamers now, get off Tinder, the real gamers are here guys”.
GamerDating is a place for single passionate adults dedicated to gaming who are looking for real relationships, offering gamers an unrivalled level of specificity, functionality and product value. The core principal of the company is authenticity, allowing gamers to join only with their first names, and a mandatory profile picture along with their favorite games, something impossible to find in game within the obscure world of gamer tags. The site does this through their unique MDR (Match dating rating) system, which for the gaming savvy is akin to multiplayer video games MMR (Match making rating) systems like League of Legends.
“Up until now, “gamer dating” websites and mainstream sites have offered a large database of people who had mentioned somewhere in their profiles that they didn’t mind video games or possibly enjoyed a mobile game, together with the usual profile field suspects,” said Palmer. “The likelihood of being matched with someone who passionately loved games was low. These sorts of white label services are borderline offensive and are shining examples of the incorrect stereotypes of gamers from people building bad products to take advantage.”
“We’re offering gamers several unique features designed specifically to help find the gamer of their dreams. We’ve expanded on your standard dating profile so you can conduct honed searches to find others who love the same games, consoles and even habits. They might live around the corner – or the other side of the world. But they’re able to find fellow gamers with similar interests arrange a date and play games together.”
Seven years ago the founders used their passion for gaming – along with their own dating high and lows – to set up the beta version of the site. While they quietly polished the service, tens of thousands of gamers were providing invaluable feedback.
“What I remember most about the sites that were around when we first started looking was how gross they made me feel as a girl gamer,” said Melissa Walther, Community Director at GamerDating.
“On one hand you pay to game with a girl who would moan sexually in chat, since 2016 I think we rebranded those to Thott’s – others slapped their logo on some tank tops and had girls in underwear talk about how women want men to buy them things. Why would I join these sites?
Serious gamers just aren’t served by existing products, and there are hundreds of millions of them – The best piece of feedback we had this year was in our email though, and quote, I joined because I: “hate Match and wanted to get off”. What else do you need to say?”
So obsessed with authenticity in the wake of recent fake profile and hacking scandal’s at Facebook is the GamerDating team, the service rewards others for finding fake profiles and spammers with premium time on the website.
“We had one lovely story recently, it’s so typical of why we love the gaming community” Palmer added “A guy joined the site, and noted that – uniquely – we have a reward system for our users when finding bad actors, and that’s true, we award people with premium time on the site for finding spammers and fake profiles. Wouldn’t you know it the guy spent hours just running round the site finding these fakes for us! We gave him a day per spammer or fake profile found, I think he must have ended up with at least 2 months, but that’s the spirit of the gaming community, we didn’t ask him to do this, but he saw the mission, gamers need to feel support and authenticity and when they do, they give back”.
What GamerDating.com is offering:
– a free basic account allowing gamers to join, search, add games, matchmake, message, read messages from premium members and be matched on GamerDating
– a paid subscription allowing members unlimited communication, a Twitter-like feed to share their story and the ability to read messages from all members including free members, who can in turn read messages from them and respond
– members are charged $35 for two months, or $70 for four months … this compares well to the industry’s standard fees of $30 – $60 a month on sites like Match, including a game offering excellent value by comparison
– members’ details are protected by GamerDating’s strict privacy policy … they will not be sold for marketing by other third party companies
– the first dating service to pioneer bundling video games and gaming gift cards with subscriptions, offering both tangible and intangible benefits from subscription
Uniquely in the past, each member of the GamerDating team struggled with compromising their love of games in the hope of holding onto relationships with non-gaming partners who didn’t understand their passion.
“When I started dating, it became apparent the girls I was seeing had no interest in games. In fact, some of them outright hated them,” said Alexander Brown, GamerDating Chief of Operations and Co-Founder.
“I accepted this as ‘normal’. I was told games were childish – that they were anti-social and caused bad habits. When I was in those sorts of relationships, I had to give up gaming. I changed as a person. I tried to be the happy-go-lucky guy that I am, but I slowly stopped being me. Being gaslighted into selling my gaming rig was the turning point.”
“GamerDating is about finding people who love games, who identify with the lifestyle of gaming. But crucially it’s about accepting yourself and being proud about who you are, who for many people means as a gamer. This is absolutely necessary to be happy in any partnership” said Brown “Whether you’re a gamer or not.”