Not necessarily profitable, but a fun idea
Twitch and youtube have proven that people are willing to throw money at others playing video games.
This website would describe an extremely difficult and entertaining gaming challenge and allow donations for people to try and attempt this challenge for the donation reward if they are the first or within the first 3 people to succeed. They would need to provide video evidence. A kaggle for gaming challenges.
With twitch, there's no competition between streamers to compete for ONE prize pool, unless I'm mistaken. This would add a new dynamic and may even add a way to be discovered, a bit like how Jokerd grew in popularity massively after being the first and fastest to hit level 60 in wow classic.
What are your thoughts on this, and what type of technologies do you think I would need to know to set up the website and implement the donations and video features?
There are groups on Facebook doing exactly the same.
Could work people like competition of the weirdest kind.
That's why early arcade games had high scores. I still miss those from time to time.
The only two immediate problems I can see is
a) judgment you really need potential people to understand a particular game or need to some other mechanic to verify that a goal has achieved.
b) Prevent people from cheating.
Once it is discovered someone cheated the whole thing will tumble down. But you could use that as a fee for your service to ensure that.
both are very important problems to spot that also crossed my mind.
With a) the work around could be a joint concensus listed in the particular 'bounty' rules on what constitutes the goal being achieved (time display on the clock being low, points being displayed and screenshotted etc)
b) is harder to implement and I entirely agree that if it was discovered that someone cheated, it would crumble. The only two workarounds for this that I can see is supporting games only with demo capture (to be able to replay the demos and more easily catch cheaters) and ensure that the entire challenge was streamed from beginning to end, although even then it would be difficult to verify that it was entirely legitimately done.
a) That should work if you have things that are clear defined and measured easily you still might need a group of experts (maybe in conjunction with the developers/publisher of the game) to define those. But if you link-in with the developers of the game you might achieve some extra promo boost as well.
b) If you mean by in-game capturing actually recording of play actions and game state so you can replay that later that's probably the best choice yes. Even though here you still could cheat by using bots. Which you can not discover if the whole thing is done offline. Playrecording the whole session might not be feasible if it takes a week of continuous playing to achieve a goal.
I guess you can only mostly rely on fair play but as soon as it becomes hugely popular cheaters will certainly appear especially if money is involved.
Maybe best to concentrate first on fast speed-run challengers you can record those shouldn't take too long and probably people less likely to cheat but you are still allowed to exploit things in the game.
lots of good food for thought that i'll definitely think about if i do pursue this. Especially liking that idea of linking in with game developers for promo boost.
There's definitely a big speed run community for numerous games so I will check that avenue first with those aforementioned issues that you had in mind.
I like the idea. What kind of games you planning to let the streamers play? You have examples?
This kind of thing has a following for single player role playing games like Final Fantasy where you have to beat that game without levelling. Other examples are levelling to 60 in world of warcraft in a self-imposed 'hardcore mode' without dying once or beating all metal gear solid games without getting spotted (although that's relatively easy to do).
As the player gets closer to beating the challenge, awareness and exposure would grow and donations could even increase even more.
Eventually it could be open to any game that a person suggests a challenge for, but rpgs and mmos especially lend themselves to this kind of thing easier than fps games, for example.
Oh that sounds nice, I earlier thought you mean like small mini games with a high score. Then you can make categories, like you can just participate for this game when you have more than 1k viewer, or one with over 10k viewers. But im not sure if someone donates for the winner of a doodle jump game, so these challenges for greater games makes sense from a consumer perspective I think. Even for one person who wants a streamer to play a specific game. Overall nice Idea, could be profitable if you take 10% of the donations for a challenge for this service.
'could be profitable if you take 10% of the donations for a challenge for this service'
That was the exact way I was going to try to monetise it.