Damon Isaac's E-Portfolio

Dear CEO,

The XBL ecosystem gives us access to millions of gamers all with similar interests and dislikes. Gamming over the years has formed somewhat of a community and because of that Microsoft’s offerings up to this point have been bullet proof out of necessity. Failed products reflect heavily on Microsoft and any developer who decided to make their content available. In order to have good content; you need to make something gamers want. This is why I am suggesting that we utilize the power of the Kinect tool and provide a game coaching service.

This game coaching service will train gamers on either how to improve or become competitive in the first person shooter (FPS) of their choice. Many FPS’S these days are nationally recognized and in some case played in tournaments when real money is on the line. Gamers organize themselves into clans or groups of gamers who work to gather to improve their team play. By offering a way of giving gamers actual tips and feedback based off their game play, I feel we will be offering a unique and practical experience. In order to do this, we will use Kinect to monitor the gamers posture, eye tracking, and pull game data for reaction times to targets. We will also pull data from the game itself to determine map positioning and map habits such as favorite pathing, and reload times. All of this data is required and when complied and analyzed correctly, our application will allows gamers of all skill types to improve on their game regardless of how good they actually are. To make this application particularly attractive, we will leverage the fact that there are professionals out there currently who already possess immense levels of skill and compete for money in tournaments. By reaching out to these gamers to tap into their skills to provide feedback to real players, we will be attracting gamers because of the allure of getting advice from top players while also providing the best coaching possible. Each professional gamer will be given a random top ranked player each week who uses our service and based on how they preform that week in the games multiplayer, the gamer will then receive an actual one on one with a professional gamer in a session to improve their skill. Since not all subscribers will get to access playing with the professionals, the session that the gamer receives will then be available exclusively to all subscribers to watch so that even if they didn’t get to play with a pro that week, they can still learn the lessons and get meaningful feedback.

Monetizing this product posses an interesting challenge. While a standard $15 a month fee will be the first step of monetization, I want to explore the idea of moving merchandise and more exclusive single player game guides to players to attract those who do not like multi-player as much.  Single player guide subscriptions will be cheaper and priced around 5-6 dollars a month. One of the issues that may arise with this idea is getting the professional gamers on board. While potentially lucrative to the professionals, many already have their own live streams now and have their own monetized way of sharing their skill.