Sam “QforQ” Houston

I’ve been thinking about updating my blog for awhile now…I often think of great topics but I never get down to actually doing it(obviously).

Some quick updates:

Last October I went to Blizzard’s BlizzCon, a convention for fans of all of their franchises (Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo). It was very very cool..an awesome game convention that was put on by just one company. Every marketer/game company person that is incharge of putting on events for their brand/company should go. They really take things to another level and you can’t help but go away and be excited about everything that Blizzard is doing. Hell, I’ve hardly even played any of their games and I bought about 50-70$ worth of swag

Things are continuing to go great over at gamerDNA. I’m really busy with some new responsibilities, experience, and some great mentorship/learning opportunities within the company. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings, especially the next 3-4 months. March will bring my year anniversary at gamerDNA and it is amazing to think about how far we have come in the last year.

I’m continuing to be active in the social media space…namely Twitter. I’ve got a post that I want to write this week about game companies being active on Twitter, sort of a short update in response to my post last August.

(Full Disclosure:  I did a write up on the gamerDNA company blog so I’m going to keep this fairly short and sweet.  The purpose of this is to give my personal take and record some of the more fun, notable events)

It has now been a week since the last day of PAX and I’m still getting back into the swing of things.  Last week I had the pleasure of attending PAX with three others from gamerDNA from Thursday through Monday which was the entirety of PAX.  We went there on a mission:  Go to the biggest gaming expo in North America and talk to people about gamerDNA.  All in all, I’d say it was a success.

If you haven’t gone to PAX before, you should.  This was my first time going to PAX and it was the biggest gaming event that I’ve ever been to.  Last year I went to SOE Fan Faire and Gen Con and those don’t even compare to the size of this event or the amount of fun had at PAX.  The PAX officials have reported that about 58,500 people invaded Seattle and attended PAX, well over the 37,000 that they had last year.  I wonder what they will have next year…and how they will fit everyone in the Seattle Convention Center.

Most of the weekend was spent spending some time walking around the Expo floor and then meeting up with the guys from work for a press interview or some other event that we wanted to attend.  Friday was very busy for us in particular because that was the opening day for PAX along with the day of our gamerDNA PAX Party that we had later that night.  During the couple hours that we had to poke around on the floor we decided to hand out gamerDNA t-shirts to random PAX goers and check out the various booths on the floor.

The expo floor was huge, with booths from all the major and some of the minor game studios out there.  Strangely absent, though, was a booth from Activision(Besides Guitar Hero World Tour and the Blizzard Booth).  While taking a quick survey of the floor I noticed the dominance of the Xbox 360 which was being used to demo practically every game on the floor.  One of the games that I did see demoed on a Playstation 3 was Mirror’s Edge (they showed the E3 level), which ironically froze up while I was watching and they had to reboot the PS3.

After only a couple hours on the show floor we had to make it back to our hotel to get ready for the gamerDNA Party.  The plan for the gamerDNA party was simple:  Have some food, some free drinks and Rock Band.  We didn’t want it to be too sales-pitchy, we wanted it to be a fun atmosphere for people to come in, talk to people and have fun playing games.

The party was a definite success with over 150 people stopping by over the course of the night.  We had a lot of friends from Microsoft show up, the GamerCast Network stopped by as well as many others throughout the night.  My personal highlight was when Alex Albrecht and Jeff Cannata from the Totally Rad Show and DiggNation showed up for a little while.  The guys played some Rock Band (which by the way, they were really good at) and hung out for a bit.  I had a chance to introduce myself and talk to Alex a bit, but it was really just cool to have guys like them show up to a party that was put on by my company.  We also had Donna Park from Electric Playground (you know, that show that used to be on G4TV..and now it’s coming back on) who interviewed our CEO Jon Radoff and ended up sticking around at the party for most of the night.  Not only was she a gamer, but she was a very cool person to talk to and seemed very genuine.  Two thumbs up!

After that Friday (the first day of PAX), we spent the rest of the weekend walking around the show floor, hitting up some panels, and doing interviews with press.  I had a great time meeting various developers of different games, as well as friends that I’ve made but never actually met before, which was really cool.  I also had the chance to play some games, but not very many…I did a lot more looking than actual playing of video games that weekend..ironically

PAX was a great experience and I’d highly suggest everyone go!  I’m definitely going to go next year with gamerDNA and I can’t wait for PAX to come to Boston in 2010

Yes, that’s right I’m moving again. This time I’m only moving a couple miles down the road, rather than across the country. The new place has a bigger room and some pretty cool room mates, one that works part timem for a game development company that is making an MMO. I’m excited about the new place and I’m looking forward to living in a new area and hanging out with some new people. We’re right next to a river and a bike path so it should be a nice area to be in as the weather warms up

Work has started to pick up a bit and we’ve got some exciting things going on. This week we implemented some cool new features, like our Xfire Auto-Blogging feature which checks your Xfire account every day and creates an automatic blog entry about it. Players can later go back and add their own details to the blog entry, like your experiences, perhaps some screenshots or youtube videos, whatever you want. We’re going to be implementing the same thing for Xbox Live and World of Warcraft soon so I’m very excited to see some cool stuff on our site that we’ve been working on for awhile. We’re shooting to officially launch GamerDNA.com sometime in June so check that out and let me know what you think when we launch

This week we decided to kick it up a notch on our company blog and update it more frequently with information about new patches and features, stuff about the company or what we’re doing internally, funny little anecdotes from the office or stuff that we see on our site….all sorts of stuff.  We want to be transparent to our community and show them that we’re gamers just like they are so whether it’s an update about a cool feature, a blog post about how we’re all addicted to GTA4 and Age of Conan or whatever it may be, it’ll be up there!  We also just launched our GamerDNA Twitter which is a great way to keep up on what we’ve got going on, stuff that we’re talking about or checking out or if we’re having any uptime or killer bugs (hope not!).  Check those out and subscribe to our feeds and follow us on Twitter!

That’s about it for now.  I’ll try to update later with some stuff about this week, some of the games I’m playing and I’ll check in after the move this weekend.  Until then have a great 3 day weekend!

Today we announced that GuildCafe has changed it’s name to GamerDNA! We’re all pretty excited about our new name as it reflects our direction of the company and our focus: Giving a place for gamers to have their own personalized space that is all about their gamer history and accomplishments. Towards the end of this spring we will have a GamerDNA that resembles the future of what our platform is going to do and offer. I’m so stoked about this and can’t wait to see where we go and watch us grow as a company over the next few months.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement:

GamerDNA Inc. announced that it completed a $3 million Series A financing led by Flybridge Capital Partners. The company, previously known as GuildCafe Entertainment Inc., will use the funds to expand product development, open new offices in Cambridge’s Central Square, and launch GamerDNA.com — a community that allows videogame players to join forces with friends, share their stories and discover what’s happening in the games they love.

For the full press release on our company blog go here.

Today Xconomy published a great interview with our CEO Jon Radoff that goes into more detail about what we’re trying to do with GamerDNA and what the future of the company will be. Check it out here.

That’s it for now. Cheers to GamerDNA!