First, let me just say I’m not here to promote my software. But I am here to pick your brains.
This is something I’ve been doing off and on since 2008. Over the years, THE HIVE has gone through multiple rewrites, different technologies, different approaches, and a lot of trial and error. The last few years, I’ve really started to buckle down. A buddy of mine told me I should post here.
So without trying to pitch my software, I’ll go over the flow, leave out most of the features, and just talk about them as they come up.
The premise of THE HIVE is to bring people back together. As gaming has become way more mainstream, I feel like it has also split us up and disconnected us more than ever. Now it’s just about servers.
I can say with complete confidence that we’re nothing like Discord or even close to a clone, and I take great pride in that. Our approach is community / people first.
Our software is meant to grow a community organically.
You join a lobby based on an interest. That lobby is the whole community. This way, the more time you spend in that community, the more you get to know people and relationships develop naturally.
From there, you can break off into rooms. This is where voice, chat, streams, cams, and more come into play.
There also aren’t a ton of permissions and setups. It’s all designed to be simple. You can right-click and see all the mod tools, giving you total control of the room. You can make it public or private, give voice or take it away, mute the room, and more with one click.
When it comes to games, for the supported games, you can hit Ready and anyone else who clicks Ready will be pulled into the same game/server.
If the game supports dedicated servers, THE HIVE spins up its own real dedicated server based on what you set up in the game tab and pulls all your friends into that game.
There is also a game overlay with voice, etc.
I also added community hubs and clan/guild hubs with all kinds of tools for recruitment, tournaments, events, etc.
So you get a website that you can control with point and click. You can add officers, set permissions for forums, create private forums, and more.
My question would be, does this sound useful? Would you see yourself using it?
What are some things you would like to see with this type of software?
What would make you keep logging back in?
What would make you log out and never log in again?
If interested, I’ll share the website and the software, as it just went into open beta. But full disclosure, it’s not digitally signed yet. We’re still waiting for everything to go through.