[aarzee]

Hi Trevor and Jared,

I'm in the idea stages of creating a website, and I have no previous experience with startups or other business; I'm only a senior in high school. The idea is that there are people who would like to own the same game on multiple platforms, and so the website would offer a discount on a game that you already own, for another platform. So, for example, if you have the Xbox One version of Rocket League, the website would offer a discount on the Steam version.

My question is: how should I gauge interest in such an idea? I don't have any real budget to speak of, and I don't know where I should go looking for people to ask.

[tlb]

Talk to your friends. The advantage you, as a young person, have over game studios with millions of dollars and hundreds of employees is that you and your friends are the customer for this sort of thing. So you should work on understanding what you and your friends want.

Then, you have to figure out the common ground between what you want (every game free!) and what's possible. The particular idea you mention, discounts on games for other platforms, seems like it would require deals with the game studios, which might be hard to get. But https://www.humblebundle.com/ built a good business around bundling several games together at a big discount, and there are probably more possibilities.

The tricky part about asking your friends is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. The only way to find out if they'd really buy something is... sell it to them for real money. Like, actually go out and buy a PS4 and XBox copy of something, and find out what they'd pay for the two together. Or try some other combinations to see what works.

[hanniabu]

In addition to what Trevor said about is being difficult to getting deals with the game studio and referencing humblebundle, I think it would be interesting/slightly easier to spin off humblebundle and offer multiple copies of the same game. When my friends and I purchase a new game on Steam or PS4, everyone else usually buys the same game so we can all play together. If there was a platform where there's tiered 'bulk' buying so the buying 1 copy will be full price, 2 copies/5% discount, 3 copies/8% discount, 5 copies/10% discount, or something along those lines I think it'd be a solid platform. It'd probably be less difficult to create and also easier to strike a deal with game studios since you're argument would be that you're encouraging more sales rather than just offering a discount on one item, which they'll probably view as a loss. Another reason why this would appeal to them is that this buying in 'bulk' would increase the community outreach and pickup.