Tony Pearce would probably admit that he stumbled into the videogames industry – he was selling advertising for British Satellite Broadcasting in the ‘80s when one of his advertisers, Telstar Records, poached him and subsequently expanded beyond records into videogames, publishing one of the very first games for the PS1, Lone Soldier.

Having entered the industry, however, he fell in love with it, and over the past 25 years, has been constantly pushing the games envelope. In 1999 he joined Digimask, which enabled the user to take what would now be called a selfie and turn it into a 3D avatar. This was groundbreaking stuff, considering that digital cameras were still just an idea at that stage.

Like a lot of ideas that are ahead of their time, Digimask didn’t catch on, so Pearce moved into mobile, joining Digital Bridges, one of the first VC-funded mobile games companies. The company initially developed and sold texting games based around football and flirting, and at £1.50 a text, made decent money.

Among his other claims to fame, he put Space Invaders on Nokia’s first Java handset, and was the first person to sell a Java game to an operator, namely Vodafone, helping to kick off the explosion in Java games that was to follow.

Player X
This led to Pearce’s next idea and venture, Player X. This was formed in 2004, and became Europe’s largest Java and BREW games aggregator, helping operators to tap into the game-developing skills of one-man-band developers, and helping these same developers to find a market for their creations. Player X sold to Zed in 2010, and after completing his earn-out, Pearce set up TeePee Games.

“This was a period where Facebook games were hot, but the biggest challenge, then as now, was discovery,” he says. “There were thousands of Facebook games, but beyond Farmville and Mafia Wars, no-one could name any others, so we developed a recommendation engine that allowed users to find related content and give them recommendations based on the games they were playing as well as matching them to games that people similar to them were playing.”

More recently, Pearce has sought to move beyond Facebook games to create a social platform that covers all types of games with GamesGRABR. It’s a Visual Social Network – think Pinterest and Tumbler – with a strong emphasis on social, community and commerce. It launched in early 2014 in beta, with the full launch later that year.

At launch, the GamesGRABR site contained 30,000 images, including pack shots, T-shirts and video footage from games. Today, it has over 100,000 images and video clips, and has attracted over 70,000 registered users, with a rate of 5,000 new users coming to the site per day.

“It’s a place where gamers come to meet and socialise with other gamers,” says Pearce. “They can filter games by platform and genre, and around 80 per cent of the games featured on the site have a ‘Buy’ button. We have affiliate deals with Apple worldwide, and with Amazon in 23 countries and we also have our own shop to sell Steam games.”

Once registered on the site, users create their own collections of favourite games, grabbing (hence the name) images and videos of the games they like, to add to their collection, using the ‘Grab’ button on the browser bar (similar to the Pin button on Pinterest). When other users discover their collection and engage with them by liking or following the user, they are rewarded with points which ultimately lead to discounts. And of course, as GamesGRABR is a gaming site, there’s a leaderboard showing which users other users are engaging with the most. The higher you climb up the leaderboard, the more points and discounts you earn.

In addition to its regular users, GamesGRABR has also partnered with some YouTube stars who have a big following of games fans, such as YogscastKIM and Caddicarus . In return for bringing traffic and new users to the GamesGRABR site, they get half of any revenues earned from games sold via their GamesGRABR collection. There are also featured collections from Disney and Extreme Sports among others, all earning money from sales within their collection.

Beyond games
But Pearce’s vision for the GRABR platform extends beyond games. His plan is to license the platform and the technology to other verticals that have a similarly loyal and enthusiastic fanbase, such as wine, music, movies and art, to create a portfolio of niche visual social networks. A brand or retailer using the GRABR platform can launch their own social community quickly, owning the customer and all the benefits and data that come with it.

“The issue is that talking to your fans on Facebook is becoming increasingly difficult,” says Pearce. “It’s estimated that a brand’s post only reaches five per cent of Facebook’s audience, unless you pay. Organic reach for brand pages is plummeting and I’ve heard a lot of brands saying that Facebook doesn’t work as an organic channel any more.”

Pearce estimates that it would take a brand just a few months to get a white-labelled GRABR-based social network up and running and expects the first one to go live within the next few months. Like GamesGRABR, each site will have social and recommendation at its core along with a detailed customer insight platform that connects brands and retailers directly with their customers. In an era when peer reviews and user-generated content have assumed an importance that could barely have been dreamed of a few years ago, he might just be on to something.

Check out the GamesGRABR experience here and GRABR for brands here.