Friday, August 8, 2008

Virtual basketball game startup gains traction with BuzzerBeater

By Christopher Calnan

Joining an already active local gaming scene, Cambridge-based Digital Field Theory LLC has attracted 27,000 members to an online basketball simulation game that incorporates an approach used for tracking planets to track players.

But unlike most other online games, Digital Field’s BuzzerBeater game is light on the graphics while leaning heavily on strategy. In short, it’s a thinking person’s game developed by astrophysicists Mark Daniels and Charles Steinhardt, who met three years ago at Princeton University.

“People are less interested in graphics than quantitative happenings,” Daniels said. “This is a difficult problem and we figured we had the background to turn this into a fantastic sports game. Our challenge as developers was not to create a cool-looking game.” They needed to appeal to people who enjoy strategic thinking.

Digital Field was formed in early 2007 and released a public version of BuzzerBeater in April 2007. The company is funded with an undisclosed amount of capital from family and friends.

At BuzzerBeater, users are allotted limited amounts of virtual money to pay virtual players with varying skill levels. The teams’ success is based on the general manager’s ability to select the right strategy for each game that is illustrated with Xs and Os depicting the locations of shots that are missed and made, Daniels and Steinhardt said.

Membership is free, but BuzzerBeater generates revenue through advertising, as well as from fees for a premium version of the game that enables users to set up private leagues and get other features.

BuzzerBeater is jumping into a busy space, as local activity in gaming has picked up this year.

In April, Jeffrey Anderson, the former CEO of Westwood-based Turbine Inc., attracted $5 million in funding to start a Foxborough-based company called Play Hard Sports Inc., which plans to distribute casual sports games over the Internet starting in the fall. That same month, Cambridge-based online gaming social networking company GamerDNA Inc. acquired Chicago-based It Can Talk Inc.

In June, Turbine revealed plans to expand its business to console games, and Kendall Square-based Conduit Labs Inc. is testing a new social gaming website.

GamerDNA CEO Jon Radoff said BuzzerBeater’s browser-based sports category has plenty of potential because it doesn’t require the time commitment of other games. “It’s still a wide-open field,” he said.

BuzzerBeater member Edju Martin, a Salisbury-based tech support worker, said competing against other members requires planning and patience.

“You’re not going against artificial intelligence that becomes predictable over time,” Martin said. “You get a lot of satisfaction from outsmarting someone else.”