Ask HN: Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Could celebrity only leaderboard(s) make an iPhone game more popular?

2 pointsamichail10 comments

In addition to global high score leaderboards for everyone, what about also having celebrity only leaderboard(s) in an iPhone game?

Do you think this could make it a lot more popular?

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I think there is definitely something to this. In the show Top Gear, we see celebrities competing for the fastest (or maybe most entertaining) lap time in their reasonably priced car. I love seeing how they will compare, even if, as an American, I don't quite know who all of them are.

But what if Top Gear created a service where people could show up and pay to drive this car around the track to see how they would compare with these celebrities? How fun would that be? Look...I've got the exact same time as Mark Wahlberg! I'm as fast as he is!

So, well, this example wouldn't happen. But, as an avid gamer, whether it's Call of Duty, or Desktop Tower Defesne, or any iPhone game, it would be quite fun to see what celebrity I am on par with.

I love this idea and could totally see it work, whether as an independent business idea or folded into Xanga or any game development studio.

How are you going to identify those celebrities in the first place and how are you going to get them to play your game in a way that you are going to be allowed to 'associate' your name with theirs without paying up ?

Twitter tells you about verified celebrities. They could submit their device UUID via twitter DM.

It would be fun for celebrities to compare their scores with other celebrities.

They could, but why should they? In other words, what's in it for them? 'fun' doesn't go very far in that world, $ does.

I would imagine like most celebrity driven business models like twitter, $.

But what also goes far for them is exposure. You know: fame, money, sex. Money is not their only driving motivator.

I thought you weren't a real celebrity without both fame and money anyway.

A high score board I can't get on no matter how hard I play or how often or how much I pay or how long I spend playing or how many people I recommend to? A game that I paid for which contains a bit I can't play and never will be able to play because of my social status?

Why not rename the current score board the "untouchables high score board" and have it frequently inaccessible, slow and losing all the scores? And charging non-celebrities extra to cover the shame and embarrassment of dealing with nobodies?

Look at it this way. There could still be an overall high-score leaderboard. This could simply be a filter applied to that leaderboard. On most leaderboards, I could really care less about who anyone is, as I have no clue who they are, and only care about where I stand in it. But if I could apply this filter to the leaderboard where I would then be able to recognize almost everyone, then I would find it much more interesting to scan. Additional filters could be applied on top of this, such as movie stars, athletes, or like Compete.com, have the ability to compare specific celebrities, on individual games, or on multiple games.

That's a different idea rather than looking at the same idea in a different way, but it's completely dissipated the annoyance feeling.

That is, as long as the main focus was on the overall scoreboard and the filters were optional. If the main focus was on the celebrity board and removing the default filters was optional that would be annoying again (although less so than a completely separate board).

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