We are taking PlayHaven into private beta today. I want to take this blog post to give a brief background on who we are and the mission we plan on undertaking to help the gaming community. But first of all, I want to thank all of you for accepting our invitation to join the PlayHaven private beta. If you have not received an invitation, but wish to join, please don’t hesitate to shoot us an Email through the contact form on the footer below.

So who are we? We are a group of avid gamers who love to create tools to help the gaming community. Before PlayHaven, we created MyGameMug.com and WoWHeadhunter.com, which are very successful tools that help online gamers find other fun gamers to play with. Both are still being used by thousands today. In our decades of playing, we’ve had a chance to really experience the pain points of the common gamer. One of these aspects is the way that most prolific gamers acquire strategy and advice for accomplishing their in-game goals: the giant ASCII text guide. While the value of these large text guides are clear to us, we feel that the current state of guide publishing and viewing is in need of a major upgrade.

We aim to empower guide writers with the easiest and most intuitive editing tools possible. Writers can easily structure their guides, add multimedia content, and publish instantly to millions, with a touch of a button. Having said that, we want guides to be just as useful, simplistic, and aesthetically pleasing for the people that read and use those guides. As a result, we wish to create a next generation gaming media site that houses the world’s largest database of micro-guides, across all games and platforms. Whether the obstacle you are facing is beating a boss, finding hidden treasure, or developing a strategy, we are certain the wisdom of your fellow gamers can help you on PlayHaven.

Let me recap our mission statement clearly: to create the next generation gaming media site that is powered by gamers like yourselves. We are all tired of the various annoyances of traditional gaming media sites. Cluttered advertising. Biased reviews. Uninformative articles. PlayHaven aims to differ from those sites in three primary ways:

1. Every piece of content on PlayHaven is created by people who actually play the games. People like you.
2. We value quality, cleanliness, and usability above all else. PlayHaven will never be cluttered with poorly written guides, annoying interstitial advertisements, or broken tools.
3. We believe in the power of the community. Everything we build is for you. So tell us what feature you want to see — we are listening.

We hope you enjoy your first experience here. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you encounter any bugs, issues, or general suggestions to make PlayHaven better. Our door is always open, and we are always listening.

Tags: PlayHaven

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 2:43 am and is filed under PlayHaven. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.