There's a large community of players dedicated to desktop role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, but with waves of Covid and all the other factors keeping people apart, sometimes its tough to get a gaming party together. Luckily, there's a startup aiming to build these connections online.
San Francisco-based StartPlaying was founded in 2020 by CEO Nate Tucker, 29, COO Devon Chulick, 34, and CTO Jared Gollhardt, 29, to help game masters and players find each other for online game play, and the startup just raised $6.5 million in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Role playing games were originally in-person, tabletop board games but many are playable online now.
The platform is essentially a marketplace where game masters can organize games and get paid for their time spent hosting and leading game play — they're called dungeon masters in Dungeons & Dragons and game masters elsewhere. On the flipside, players can find and sign up for sessions that they're interested in and even leave reviews about game masters.
StartPlaying is creating a more centralized platform to make it easier for them to find each other, and was inspired by the founders' own experiences.
There are informal networks of role playing gamers who connect to play and get paid as game masters but they're scattered around sites like Discord, Reddit and independent websites, Tucker told me.
Tucker is an avid player, and Chulick had been moonlighting as a paid game master for a couple of years and was even featured in a Bloomberg News article about it in 2019.
"So many people were looking to hire game masters, it was so hard to find one. And it was so tedious," Chulick told me. Lots of players don't want to run the games themselves, either, and "we both had the same thought. It should be easier to start playing games."
Game masters on StartPlaying's platform can use any virtual tabletop gaming sites or software to host a session and set their own rates, typically between $15 to $20 per player, from which StartPlaying takes a 10% cut.
The platform currently has around 1,000 game masters who have hosted 20,000 unique players from all over the world. And in-person gaming sessions could get added to the platform in the future, as well.
The company has already started testing out in-person sessions in six U.S. cities including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Atlanta and Seattle.
StartPlaying has a team of six full-time employees, which Tucker wants to double by the end of the year including roles in engineering and product design. And over the next year or so, they will also be focused on improving the user experience and the site's recommendation system.
The site is designed for players who are 18 years and older, but youth can currently play with a guardian's permission. Eventually, the company would like to create experiences that are customized for players between the ages of 13 to 18, as well.
