There are few things more hilariously hopeless than watching someone play a modern video game for the first time: their targeting cursors wobble aimlessly across the screen, unleashing a stream of bullets that manage to hit everything but their target. And amid their cries of frustration and accusations of cheating, they seem to inevitably come to one conclusion: “this game sucks”.
Unfortunately, this phenomenon is bad for the industry, as a bad experience can turn off a fledgling gamer from gaming entirely. And while developers do everything they can to make their games as accessible as possible to novices (or newbies, as they’re often called), nothing can make up for the years of experience many of today’s gamers have under their belts. At least, until now.
Meet GamerTrainer, a new startup that offers in-game tutoring sessions online across a variety of today’s most popular games. For $30 an hour (or less if purchased in bulk), you can have a private lesson with one of the site’s official GamerTrainers, all of whom have years of experience in the games they’re teaching.
At launch supported games include:
• Battlefield: Bad Company™
• Call of Duty 4®: Modern Combat™
• Guitar Hero® III and Rock Band™
• Halo® 2 and 3
• Madden NFL 09
• Rainbow Six® Vegas 1 and 2
• Super Smash Bros.® Brawl
• World of Warcraft
GamerTrainer has a great idea, and could easily be a hit if it can get enough exposure – in fact, it is a business model that the industry may want to consider embracing. In the days before the internet, gaming systems offered dedicated phone “hint lines”, which gamers could call whenever they ran into trouble (for only a few dollars a minute). Since then, games have become far more complex – written tips no longer suffice, and the barrier to entry has been raised. It’s in the industry’s best interest to help prospective gamers as much as possible, and private tutorials could easily be very lucrative way to increase a game’s user base.
Hello, Gametrainer? I’m a young german boy who sometimes gets frustrated when I lose at Unreal Tournament…..
Finally a use for people who wasted their childhood playing games.
$30 per hour?! I’ll train for free!
Thanks Gametrainer for teaching me all i know – Leeroy
At least I have chicken…
Cool, I’ll try it http://playum.com
$30/hr? Just keep buying slightly older games and try each for an hour until you find one you are good at.
I tend to think modern games are much more user friendly than older games. Older games never had any instruction or ramp up, you were just thrown into it. There was slightly less to control or worry about but that doesn’t matter when the 2nd level is unforgiving and requires perfect execution.
I want to apply to be one of their gaming trainers. Of course, I’ll need a long training period first to make sure I’m good at all those games…
i would just head to gamefaqs and read
you cant train reaction skills
and that is one of main reason some sucks at games
are you shitting me? dumbest. idea. ever. kids who have trouble wind up on sites like gamefaqs to gather cheats and codes…duh. these are the same kids who have to scrape together 60 bucks for new titles – and now you want 30 more to teach them to play?
here’s an idea: you buy dinner for 20 bucks and then pay me ten and i’ll sit on the phone with you for 1 minute and remind you to pick up your fork. it’s called forkster. it supports the use of seesmic as well.
I agree – this demographic would rather cut themselves, instead of pay that fee
…and besides, they’re resourceful as-is – that is to use various online tutorials if need be
good idea – thousands of people buy in-game money all the time on Ebay. These people aka ‘n00bs’ who buy gold would probably find these services worthwhile.
If you pay for “game tutors”, it’s quite likely that (a) you’ve never been laid and (b) are unlikely to get laid in the foreseeable future. Congrats, you tool!
I don’t know, maybe this site isn’t targeting those kids scraping the money together. Maybe it’s for those older people who are intimidated by gaming. I’ve tried WoW, call me a tool all you want, but it’s not easy just jumping into that.
Kudos for a fresh idea.
I see this more for older gamers who are trying to break into more modern games, which can be tough (and these are people who are more likely to have expendable income).
Hi!
Have you seen this page?
http://www.unne...yknowledge.com/
Check it out!
Over 200 useless knowledge!:)
If you don’t have the fine motor skills for gaming then your online entertainement options ends up relegated to reading and posting comments on tech blogs.
Noobs can start out with CNET (level 1) and then slowly climb the ladder all the way up to the higher levels like TC (level 12) or Valleywag (level 13). Extra points for using “advanced” weapons systems such as Seesmic or Twitter.
What level are you?
(If you are not Top100, we can help you break in! $30/hr. www-flamertrainer-dot-com.
Haha. This is wicked-cool. We’ll see if it survives.
For WoW this is actually OK, but for FPS’s? Wow, no way…
And even with WoW, there is SO MUCH info you need to know from 1-70 (soon to be 80), and without playing the game anything a trainer tells you is gonna get mashed around in your head because they are just random words – imagine being trained how to use a computer for the first time, over the phone.
But there is some good info which you could be told about, and it might be worth $30, but I’m sure 1hr of your time googling and checking out WoWWiki.com will teach you everything you need to know, as you need to know it.
OMG!!! $30 is quite tooo expensive.. just search for the cheats and work on it for you to learn the basics..
good idea – thousands of people buy in-game money all the time on Ebay. These people aka ‘n00bs’ who buy gold would probably find these services worthwhile.
$30/h in 100 or 1000 hours?
Now I know what to get my spoiled nephew for Xmas! I’ll be the coolest uncle ever!
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Not sure if this site is a good idea or not. If the focus is on training older people with little to no experience playing games why do you think they will decide to start playing games now? Now if they plan to show people how to find an item step by step, or something like that, why not just go on Youtube and do a search before forking over $30? People upload strategy videos for the latest games all the time on Youtube.
I’m not suggesting that it won’t work, but the most dedicated gamers tend to be people who have played games for years. I remember reading that the average gamer and consumer for that market is between 25 and 33 years of age. They already know how to play because they grew up playing games.
I remember the NES tip lines and I recall that Nintendo dropped that program because people simply were not using it. They also had a series of videos with tips from top players that did not market well. Maybe this will do better. We shall see.
As a gamer for the last 15 years I’ve to say this is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in quite some time.
First, as some here already said, game hotlines by SEGA or Nintendo go all the way back to the late 80s, and were a failure.
Why? simple: if there’s something great about gaming is having to find your way in the game. Tips are spoilers, and ruin the experience.
But the silver bullet for this service is older than the company itself: the internet. Back in the days before the ‘net the only way to find tips and cheats was buying a mag or a guide. But after 1995 there was a HUGE influx of sites dedicted to user-created tips, guides, cheats and even hacks.
The amount of such sites is so huge thats pretty much overkill. I’m making a new type of gaming site and I won’t include a guide section because 90% of all gaming sites already have one and nobody uses them.
That’s a concept I worked hard on for about 2 years. At the time, the financial forecast always ended up with “bankrupt”.
I think it’s still too early.
This could however have been successfully launched in South Korea.
no, thank you. i dont want to waste my time to learn Warcraft. time is gold
First of all, the headline is misleading. Second, i love this idea.
The service is aimed at 30-45 year old who never got to play any kind of games and want to try out this form of entertainment. 30$/h is by far cheaper than eating out or watching some damn opera and if you make >$100k, you don’t spend even a second thinking if its worth spending $30 or not on something you got excited or at least interested about.
When it comes to WoW, even players with extensive cRPG experience may get discouraged and lose interest because of it’s character (no one tells you what to do, you just get thrown into world). So this game is especially worth supporting.
As for other games/genres, I’m suprised they don’t provide help for racing and sport games – these are very easy to learn for a casual gamer, yet still are going to be troublesome for newbies and quite probably are most appealing to those 40-year-olds
PS: “CoD4: Modern Combat”? It’s “Modern Warfare”
I’m pretty good at Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum – any takers, please visit my site.
Genius idea, one of the better startups I have seen this year. If they get their marketing right this could really take off.
Think the important thing behind this for publishers is that the clients who use this service have money, and if they start liking a game because they are good at it then the probability of a sale for any add-ons or sequels rises drastically.
$30 an hour! I’d rather buy a guide, or find free content on the internet, there are a lot of free resources out there online, and figuring out stuff your self is more rewarding than paying someone to teach you how to do it, at least that is my opinion.
lol! I think that’s funny. It’s like hiring a friend to play with you. Just join a clan, or look online for help,…