Meet Philipp Gladkov, CEO of Social Platform: Gameram

Tell us about Gameram

Gameram is a social network for mobile gamers. It sounds simple, like “okay, there is Discord, Twitch, and here is another one”. The thing is it is not.

We ourselves are players, and we are far from being kids, my co-founder Oleg is 30 and I am 37. We enjoy playing games, discussing them and sharing our game experiences with our friends. The problem is – how actually I can find people who share the same game interest who can understand me and share my experience?

The answer is not as simple as it seems. Actually hardcore games, sometimes referred as esport games, (like player vs player shooters), are pretty much popular everywhere. So it is quite an easy task to find the community for hardcore gamers. And yes the average age of an esport player is 16 – 18.

But there are mobile players (more than three billion people), with an average age of 30+ (just like us). Games are stigmatised, that “only kids play games”, “mobile games are not real games”, and this is why really small amount of people share their gaming content on social media like Instagram/Facebook. Probably the major reason for that is there is no special vulnerable free place for such gamers. This led us to create Gameram.

Gameram aims to bring people together, wherever they are from, whatever game they play to have fun, meet each other and share their gaming progress among people who can truly appreciate it!

What do you think makes this company unique?

There are two main factors that differentiate Gameram:

1. Player identity.

There is Linkedin for the professional identity, Instagram for personal identity, but there is still no place for player identity. We are creating a special place for “my player identity”, to let users share their player side, that is either hidden, or scattered around – games on smartphone, steam or consoles. When one meets someone, they can have a peek at the person’s life on Instagram, professional career on Linkedin etc. We want to add a new dimension to that – gaming preferences and experience in Gameram.

2. Matching friends toolset.

We focus on building horizontal social network and provide all tools necessary to help players meet each other, based on their gaming interests. Surprisingly there are gaming social networks that provide team mates search, but the overwhelming majority of networks are based on influencers, and don’t have any friends recommendation system, or any proper ways to find new friends.

Gameram provides tools for users to share their interest so they can find new friends and teammates: users profile with list of games, profile posting feed, playing status, game IDs etc.
We worked out a friends recommendations system based on how profile matches to help users find friends. We are speaking about hundreds of games and several platforms.

We are not focusing on influencers at this point. The problem with influencers, that they create “ideal” professional content, that can disregard posting of an average user and take too much views and attention, so rarely take part in genuine friendship. Evidently we try to give everyone a chance to find their community.
 

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Three years ago, we launched Gameram with the bold hypothesis that there should be a place for people like us. After studying the audience and conducting numerous surveys on mobile gamers’ needs, we proved that Gameram platform has its own place for millions of people who are searching for interaction and new friends bonded by mobile games preferences.

We looked at small communities of mobile players scattered across forums, Instagram alternative accounts, Pinterest, and Reddit. Now, the platform has hundreds of thousands of content for a couple of thousand games made each month, and from users’ perspective, it is just what they need. The platform has grown to have 300 thousands monthly active users and around 10 thousands organic installs per day, so now we have a much greater understanding of user needs.

The market for mobile game developers has changed a lot during this period. Previously, it was a money game where investing a dollar in ads would yield $1.5 in revenue. However, this era is ending with the IDFA crisis, and more mobile game developers are looking for places to create communities and boost user-generated content (UGC). “Game brand awareness” is a hot topic at almost every game conference starting in 2022.

A big part of our business model is to provide community services and tools to spread UGC for game developers, and the market is fast moving towards this idea as well. Successfully proven Gameram’s product market fit and working business model led us to the next big step – a growth stage which we are approaching rapidly and this is thrillingly exciting.

What can we hope to see from Gameram in the future?

At Gameram, we aim to become the go-to social network for gamers who play casual and midcore games, including merge games, simulation games, dress-up games, tactical shooters etc.. We want to be a major player in the social space in gaming socials and a no-brainer default gaming social network for players who are underrepresented on other networks.
To achieve this we will continue improving our vulnerable free place for casual gamers. We have huge plans on developing AI for preventing toxicity and introducing a wide range of tools for posting gaming content. On the other hand we are working on community economy as a way to support not only content creators but also community enthusiasts.