Playfield Blog

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Summer Update: Paypal, Notifications, Desktop App, Playfield Mobile and more!

We’ve been hard at work all summer long and we’ve recently rolled out some long-awaited new features! 

1. Paypal Support

You’ve been asking for this for a while now, and I’m happy to announce that Playfield now fully supports Paypal payments. Sorry it took us a while!

2. Better Notifications

Get notifications on Playfield or via email if a game you follow is on sale, is recently released or has any new updates. You can also follow users and see what they are posting, liking and buying on Playfield! Make sure you follow your favorite games and users daily!

3. Buying is easy

We still don’t believe in shopping carts, because buying games needs to be simple and quick. However, we’ve added more info to the buying dialog to give you more details on your purchase - you can now see the original price, the deal promotions, your Playfield store credits and choose your payment option in just one screen.

4. Playfield Desktop App

The Playfield Desktop App Beta is now available! The app gives you quick access to your games library and your notifications, shows you the latest deals and makes it a lot faster to redeem your Steam keys. Download it now!

5. Coming soon: Playfield Mobile

We’re currently working on Playfield Mobile (iOS/Android), which will be a fully cross-platform application for discovering, buying and engaging with both mobile & PC games. More info soon!

Hope you guys are having an awesome summer, much love to the whole community!

Harri / Playfield

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Approaching 100,000 players and going real-time & social

Today, we’re announcing a few things. 

First, following four months of 15% average weekly growth, our active user base is rapidly approaching 100,000 players on the platform. It’s absolutely awesome to see so many players joining Playfield, along with nearly 2,000 games from almost 1,000 developers & publishers.

Second, we’re announcing a few awesome new features:

1) A real-time recommendation engine, that helps you discover awesome games on-the-fly on Playfield

2) A content aggregator, affectionally nicknamed “Megamouth”, that gathers gaming-related content from various sources and delivers that content on Playfield

(image: Shark aficionados notice that this is not an actual Megamouth, but a Basking Shark, of course.)

3) Social connectivity - allowing you connect with your friends on Playfield and being able to see what games they are playing, interested in and interacting with.

Our goal is to provide our community members with the best things in gaming, tailored for them personally, every day. These new features are the first step toward that goal.

Hope you guys enjoy the new stuff. Please send us feedback, and remember to keep playing every day! 

- Team Playfield

ps. The full press release / news alert is below:

GAME DISCOVERY AND DISTRIBUTION PLATFORM PLAYFIELD NOW BOASTS NEARLY 2000 GAMES FROM 1000 DEVELOPERS

PC Game Hub Playfield Adds Community & Content Features, Grows its User Base to About 100,000

Shark Punch, Finnish startup backed by London Venture Partners focused on creating a contemporary game discovery and distribution platform, has already demonstrated tremendous momentum across acquiring games, players and innovative product development updates. With only six months in beta, Playfield has added nearly 2000 games from 1000 developers across indie and AAA gamemakers of all genres. The player base has also organically grown 15% weekly in just four months to 100,000.

Playfield is a marketplace and community platform that helps players find games based on personal preferences. Now Playfield automatically surfaces content relevant to each game, from Let’s Play videos to trailers, game reviews and more. Using a content aggregator that pulls information from the internet directly to their game pages, the Playfield storefront adjusts in real time, showcasing live personal game recommendations for their users.

“We think of Playfield as a combination of a more modern improved Steam blended with a TripAdvisor for games,” Jiri Kupiainen, CEO, Shark Punch, said. “Discovery and the right information to make consumer choices are the biggest problem in a sea of games. Most storefronts are informed by sales data so players often miss gems; we are helping developers find their audiences based on player tastes and relevant information.”

Playfield is scheduled to launch Spring 2016. To check out the latest game additions head to Playfield.io.

Edit: VentureBeat interviewed our CEO Jiri, check out what he had to say!

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Be social, get a discount

Social Discount gives buyers a chance to gain store credit by inviting their friends. Credit is earned for all first time purchases by friends invited to Playfield with the buyer's personal code. Everyone receiving an invite also gets 10% off of their first purchase.

‘Tis the season of giving, and with Playfield's new feature, Social Discount, you can do just that! Anyone with a completed Playfield purchase can now pass their friends a 10% discount, and net 10% of their purchase as store credit for themselves for future purchases!

More details in the Social Discount FAQ.

P.S. New buyers can also combine the 10% discount with any current game discount, making this holiday season a time to be truly merry. Head to Playfield to take advantage of some superb deals, like this one!

For a limited time, and with the 10% first purchase discount, grab Door Kickers for just $3.60/3.41€/£2.70!

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At Playfield, it’s the Community’s Choice

Community’s Choice is a new feature of Playfield, empowering the users to influence which game gets one of the ever-important feature slots on the front page. Playfield measures users’ votes, follows, and comments to find the hottest topic of the week to get the extra featuring.

Back over the summer, we held a competition to launch the most community hyped indies to gamescom. This contest, won by Awakening of Heroes, BLACKHOLE, and Switchcars, was a great success for us, and for the developers who got to showcase their game to over 300 000 visitors at the gamescom event, and we wanted to make it a regular feature on our site. The Community’s Choice was born.

You can read more details of the Community’s Choice in our FAQ, and participate by following, voting and commenting on your favorite game!

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Playfield helps you reach the right audience, build a stronger community, and sell more games

Here at Shark Punch, we’re thrilled to announce the beta release of Playfield, our social discovery and community platform for games.

Without any shadow of a doubt, the biggest problem for game developers, publishers, and users alike is discovery. It’s a massive industry-wide problem that affects absolutely everyone, and the systems that are supposed to make life easier have been broken for some time. Far from providing a curated or personalized experience, app stores are now more like turning on a television and simply hoping that something good might be on.

Success is no longer predicated on simply getting games in front of a large audience and hoping for the best. Now, it’s about putting that game in front of the right audience. In order to be successful, developers need to look at user-acquisition as an ongoing relationship with the audience rather than as a one-time cost, and Playfield is designed to do just that. By combining insights gleaned from analytics data along with strong community and social features that allow users to share feedback and make suggestions, Playfield creates a personalized experience for each user that will point them to games that they’re more likely to want to buy.

We connect to the social platforms that gamers are using every day, like Twitter and YouTube, and pull in the assets, content, and conversations that are happening around each individual title. As Playfield continues to evolve based on feedback from its audience and partners, every game page will serve as both a storefront and a community hub. They will collate all available information into a single page for users to follow where they will also be able to comment and vote on new features. Publishers and developers can create a hub very early in the life of a game, and start providing a visually engaging way for fans to keep track of cool games as they’re being made. Then, based on community engagement, user activity and social connections, we can make highly accurate recommendations.

We want to see great indie developers succeed, and our terms reflect that. Games added during 2015 will enjoy increased profit sharing (90% percent!) until the end of February 2016. After this date developers and publishers will still be making 75 percent, which is one of the best deals in the business. We also have plans in future to help streamers and other media partners make money without having to resort to working with shady unauthorized key resellers.

At launch we’re proud to be working with some wonderful indie developers, including Bossa Studios (Surgeon Simulator,) Secret Exit (Turbo Dismount,) Almost Human (Legend of Grimrock,) BitBox (Life is Feudal.) We are also partnering with publishers Deck 13, Kiss Ltd., and TinyBuild and there are many more on the way.

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Playfield July recap

It’s August, and as the Finnish summer hasn’t really looked like one, we look forward to Cologne and gamescom being a sunnier experience. Before the Playfield team heads out towards gamescom to meet the contest winners, let’s have a quick look at what’s happened recently.

The gamescom contest was a great success, with the community and jurors choosing three amazing indie games to join us at gamescom from among the hundreds that participated. As this was our first contest, we weren’t sure what to expect, but the event exceeded our expectations and we are happy to help fellow indies to get more visibility for their game at the Playfield booth.

Of course, we are also elated with the numbers of users who took their time to participate and support their favorites in the contest. But perhaps the most satisfying moment of the contest was to read the blog post by Altfuture, who won the jury’s vote, about the contest and the experience.

Come find us and Altfuture’s Switchcars at Playfield booth in gamescom at Hall 10.1, inside the Indie Arena Booth (A050, B051)!

Developers can now make direct game page updates on the game page.

And while during some days, it felt we were doing nothing but running the gamescom contest, we also squeezed in some new features to help the developers and players. Developers can now post their updates directly to their game page, and if players notice their favorite game is not yet up on Playfield, they can take action and set it up themselves, simultaneously becoming a moderator for the game!

All users can now create a game page for their favorite game!

Here’s a full list of changes and improvements in Playfield:

A Youtube video will be automatically embedded to the game page, if the Youtube link in the Connections tab is a direct link to a video or a playlist.

Developers can now make updates directly on their game page.

All users can now create a game page. Game pages without developers are considered community founded pages.

Users can now become moderators for a game.

Game pages now also have a general comments section.

Twitter linking has been refined; less permissions are now needed by Playfield.

The new sorting order "Science" uses multiple variables to sort the content to prioritise what users have found most interesting. Now on by default.

Front page is no longer split into days.

Main page content can now be filtered into categories including iOS, Android, desktop, and “Play right now” that shows all the games with playable builds.

Numerous fixes to functionality, layout, stability, and performance.

With that, we’re off to enjoy the German summer, and meet the hundreds of thousands of visitors of gamescom. If you’re around, come say hi at the Playfield booth in Hall 10.1, sections A050 and B051, at the Indie Arena Booth!

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Playfield goes to Germany with the Indie winners!

It’s almost time for gamescom, the world’s largest computer and video game event. Playfield is of course going, and we like to take our friends with us! Three amazing indie games, as voted by the Playfield community and chosen by the indie jury will be sharing our booth at the Indie Arena, where they get to showcase their game for free.

Come visit our booth (Hall 10.1) to play the games, congratulate the winners, and to see our showreel of the best indie games on Playfield!

At the Playfield booth, we have the three gamescom contest winners showcasing their game. Awakening of Heroes and Blackhole got through earlier with the community support, and we’re now revealing the jury’s pick of the remaining top-5 games:

Please join us in congratulating Switchcars, by Altfuture, the overall winner of the jury review! It’s worth noting that all jurors mentioned the high level of contest, and all the reviewed games were prime examples of the amazing level of indie productions today. However, a winner had to be picked, and Switchcars emerged victorious. Here are some quotes from the jury:

“Crisp, frenetic, intimidating, funny, frustrating. A great little game.” -Christer “McFunkypants” Kaitila

“I really wanted to play more and different modes, I am addicted.” -Dajana Dimovska

Head on to Playfield and check out the the winning games now!

All the other reviewed games also received feedback from the jury, and we hope it’ll encourage and inspire them to improve on their excellence. Congratulations to Failure, Horizon Chase, Hyperdrive Massacre, Through the Woods, and The Last DeadEnd to making it to the top-5, they too will be featured at gamescom, in our Playfield showreel. 

This was the first contest by Playfield, and due to how well it was received by the developers and the community, we’re planning on plenty more in the future. Come meet us at gamescom in Hall 10.1, booths A050 and B051, and we’ll talk about what Playfield can do to help indie developers!

-Tero / Community Manager

Playfield is a discovery platform by Shark Punch. We offer a way for players to discover great, fresh new games that might otherwise be left unnoticed. We have content you can vote and comment on, and as you do, we learn to give you individual recommendations for more things you’ll like. And after you've discovered the next thing for you, we make it easy to connect with the game, its developers and the community. 

Indie Arena is set up by a wonderful group of indie developers who took it upon themselves to help indies get their share of the massive trade exhibitions, and who Playfield are proud to sponsor. Guaranteed to be the most tightly packed area in games/squares, the Indie Arena is in the Hall 10.1, Booths A050 B051. 

gamescom is the world’s largest computer and video game event. Held in 5th to 9th of August in Cologne, Germany, with a total area of 193,000 square metres, it will host all the major games and companies, as well as an unprecedented collective stand for independent developers, the Indie Arena Booth. gamescom provides its visitors a complete look at the entertainment medium of the future.

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Community vote results are in

The Playfield gamescom contest community votes have now been counted and verified, and we're ready to announce the winners who will join us at the Playfield booth in gamescom!

Congratulations to Awakening of Heroes (Most Follows) and BLACKHOLE (Most Votes) for their superb effort at engaging their fans! As their prize, they claim a free booth area at gamescom, at the Playfield booth in the Indie Arena.

In addition to the two instant winners, we'll also have the jury's choice to look out for! Over the next few days our jurors will play and analyze the remaining top-5 games from both categories, and choose the last winner for the main prize: free showcasing at gamescom. These games are presented to the jury:

The indie-superstar jury will choose the winner during this week. Winner will join the other two teams and showcase their game at Playfield booth in gamescom.

And finally, all the games in the top-10 make it to our gamescom showreel! The showreel will be playing non-stop to the 350 000 visitors of gamescom at our booth.

The following games will be featured:

Awakening of Heroes

BLACKHOLE

Horizon Chase

The Last DeadEnd

Through the Woods

Switchcars

Hyperdrive Massacre

Forced 2

Ramble Scramble

Thea:The Awakening

Failure

Piggy Match

Spoiler Alert

Thanks to every developer for their participation, and to every fan for helping their favorite game reach new audiences through Playfield!

See you at gamescom!

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Last stretch of gamescom contest starts now!

Our contest began just over a week ago, and it keeps getting fiercer by the day. We now enter the final stretch, and we decided to raise the stakes to make sure everyone’s got a goal to reach!

Thus, we introduce:

We’ll create a showreel featuring all the games in both of the top-10 categories to be played non-stop at the Playfield booth in the Indie Arena.

We want to keep the contest and prizes available to all participants from unknown to well established indies - this is what Playfield is all about. To do this, we decided to add yet another layer of prizes; the top-10 games in both categories of the leaderboard will be featured in our gamescom showreel!

At the time of writing, you’ll need less than 100 followers, or 300 upvotes, to get your game seen by the 350 000 visitors of gamescom. We’ve already seen bigger swings in few hours, so there’s plenty of time left. Go set up your page, let your fans know you want this, and get to gamescom!

Let’s keep it clean to the end

We’ve been pleased to see there’s been little to no attempts to use fake accounts, or other underhanded tactics in the contest, but as always, there are few unfortunate examples of someone feeling so strongly about their favorite game they’re willing to to work around the rules. We’re tracking these cases, and will remove any such gains. Fortunately, we don't expect there to be a major impact to the leaderboard.

-Tero / Community Manager

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Announcing our jury!

The Playfield gamescom contest for independent developers is halfway through, and we’ve already seen multiple exciting lead changes between the best of the indie games. Follow the contest here on our leaderboard page!

Now, it's time for us to announce the jury of three influential indie minds, who will choose the third winner out of the top-5 entries. Remember that because of the jury’s choice, getting your game to the top-5 will be worth all the effort - you’ll not only receive feedback from the experienced indie developers in the jury, but also have the final chance to win in the contest and showcase your game at gamescom!

So, without further ado, here’s our jury:

Dajana Dimovska, president of Hexblade, co-founder of Knapnok Games and the Copenhagen Games Collective

Christer Kaitila, "One Game A Month"

Rami Ismail, “One half of Vlambeer"

With a jury like this, you’re bound to improve your game by just being in the contest!

Finally, a quick update on how the contest has been going so far. The position at the top has been windy; Forced 2 started strong and secured both categories, only to be knocked down a notch by Blackhole, though they only just registered! And when Switchcars joined the race, they cruised all the way to the second spot on the Votes category in no time at all.

With so many daily changes, the leaderboard is very much alive, and with a gamescom entry at stake we demand all the indie developers join the contest! Over 100 independent games have already signed up, so join in on the fun and grab your share of the thousands of votes cast by the fans.

There's no better way to show your game at gamescom, and everything's still up in the air! Join in, let your fans know, and we'll see you at gamescom!

Tero / Community Manager

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Welcome to our gamescom contest. Here's how to win!

As you might have heard yesterday, we’re offering three awesome indie devs the opportunity to come showcase their game for free at gamescom! If you have not yet participated, go do it now!

Here are some tips and clarifications to how best maximise your chances to win:

1) Build a superb game page Go through each of the tabs at the game edit page, and fill all the fields to ensure users get the most out of the page. Pay special attention to linking your game-specific Twitter account so that the images and gifs you tweet are also visible on the game page. By putting a direct link to a Youtube video, you'll also get that video embedded directly to your page.

2) Use your Twitter Actively tweet images and gifs with your linked Twitter account, and Playfield will automatically also include these on your game page. Your tweets become updates, which can be voted on, and are needed to win the 'Most votes' category of the contest.

3) Mobilize your fans Now that you have your game page looking magnificent, and you have plenty of interesting updates on it, it's time to let your fans and players know that they can help you get their favorite game to gamescom, for free! That's 'for free' for them, and for you! Use your existing channels; FB, Twitter, Snapchat, IRC, MySpace(???), to bring your fans together to Playfield, and encourage them to follow your game and vote on your updates. As a nice bonus, your players become part of your Playfield community, which keeps them in the loop, and helps spread your game to new fans through Playfield discovery! Everyone wins!

4) Know the rules There are three categories, and three winners for the prize package. The game with most followers is the first one to go. Next, the game with most votes on its updates joins it. To avoid spamming, only the 12 updates with most votes count for each game. Finally, the jury of prestigious indie minds will go through the rest in the top-5 of each category, and choose the last winner. Remember that to be able to claim the prize, the winner has to have a playable build available for showcasing (and for the jury), and must travel to gamescom at their own expense.

5) Don’t hesitate!

More and more developers are signing up and some of the contestants have a strong start, but nothing's decided before Sunday the 19th! So get busy and get to gamescom!

-Tero / Community Manager