I’ve been listing my online games on the player-GM-match platform StartPlaying since last year. Here’s how it’s gone so far.
StartPlaying calls itself “the largest online platform for players to find tapletop roleplaying games” and for the GM it provides a bunch of services - you get a nice profile page, a simple way to schedule and price sessions, a review system, a messaging system to communicate with players and they take care of all the billing/charging too.
I’m pretty pleased with how these services all work together - I don’t think the UI is much to write home about but it’s improved in useful ways over the past year and I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t continue. They take a cut of billings. That’s very reasonable. It all works nicely.
A few things I’ve been impressed with - it handles timezones well so I can list things in my local timezone and avoid some of the confusion with players around the world. And recently they’ve released calendar subscription which is great for sharing my listing times with my partner or automating my upcoming games posts.
For players I think it works well - you can sign up and find a campaign pretty easily and expect a good experience and there are a good variety of systems , styles and settings to choose from.
None of these things matter though as a GM, if it can’t deliver the players to you.
I guess I’m in an odd situation - I schedule games when my kids are in school, which means mornings GMT. This is a reasonable evening time in Australia but sucks for the UK and Europe - people seem to have proper jobs to go to - and only extreme nighthawks can make it from the States. I’ve managed to get a couple of games off the ground and all my players have come from my marketing efforts off-site. I’ll write about those another time. But the site itself really hasn’t delivered the amount of players I need to make a success of things.
The discord is full of GMs happy to critique your profile or your adventure listings to encourage sign-ups and there are helpful webinars run by the company on best practices for listings. Call me cynical, but the advice feels a bit SEO-like: ‘here are some things that gave results for me by luck, dressed up as hard advice you should follow’. What worked for one GM twelve months ago to build their audience is as close to anecdote and as far from data as I can imagine.
I’d really like to see some more analytics. I want to know how many people viewed my listings on the site, how many clicked through, how many moved on to read my profile, how many went on to book a different GM. All so I can to try to figure out what point they decided against signing up and tweak accordingly. That way I could make a stab at a few adjustments and more importantly I could monitor behaviour after making changes to see if there’s an effect.
Right now, I’m only guessing that there aren’t many people looking in my games’ timeslot. I have no idea perhaps there are hundreds that just don’t want what I’m selling or are turned off by something I say in my profile. I have no way to tell. Pretty sure the over-confident advice-givers on discord have no way to tell either!
I’d also like to see a better matchmaking service for GM seat-swapping - this is when another GM joins your game to make up the numbers and you recriprocate for them. There’s a discord channel - but it didn’t work at all for me. Approaching GMs directly had a much better result. If games take a while to fill with players, it’s essential that I can offer a decent game to the first couple that show up.
I’m going to stick with StartPlaying for now. As I say, the services it provides all work well enough together an do make my life easier but I’m left having to do the marketing myself, and somewhat in the dark. I think I would prefer a different balance - I’d be happy with less developed GM services if the marketing was slick and it delivered players to me.
If you do want to try out StartPlaying, as a player, using this referral link gives me a little kickback when you book your first game: https://startplaying.games/referral/ckrxv8ebu2dfvbopkbp96htc0