34.5

A- Purpose

The purpose of this social network is to enable people to connect to each other and within a gaming community. It will enable people to keep up to date with their games and studios as well as other people. There will be pages where people are able to talk about games and others where posts by people and companies are together. It will be able to be followed by anyone and will enable people to keep up to date and learn about games and what's happening in the gaming space. As well as this It will enable game based media companies to get a influence and post articles in and around the gaming world. As well as this there will be a tournament feature where people can set up private and public matches to contest within a group of people. It will also be a place for people to collect their various social gaming network accounts to display on the site, including their scores from them such as the various point systems in Xbox, PlayStation and steam, this will collect into a 'Gamer score' for a level on the website, gamers with a higher score will have their posts bolder in the feed and the discover section as well as have bragging rights.
All of these different purposes are to appeal to the target audience through having a gamer score to tap into the target audiences competitiveness with the gamer score which helps aggregate the users levels into a clear level for use in the site. This competing will encourage the users to take part in different sections of the site as it is too their benefit to do so.
The tournament feature is also to appeal to the target audience with a easy place for people to compete yet again tapping into the nature of the target audience. 

B-Content

For this I am going to use a flat style with each component being a large bold section of the page. I am going to have a set of scroll-able quick access pages and a list of posts from there. There will also be flat iconography with having these on circles or apart of another unit. I will use these circles to act as almost floating buttons to connect to chat and to write a post. The colours will be bold to emphasis the content. I will have icons on the side of the feed for quick access to the various sections of the site
The reasoning for a bold and distinctive website is to make it stand out compared to the others, as well as this the target user are young adults who like more modern themes to the sites as well as having distinctive personalities which I want to pass on the website, making it unique as well as appealing to the target audience. There will be posts and videos on the site along with the site being split up into pages for each user, game and company.

C-Target User/Membership

The target audience for this is going to be any gender with a focus on people aged 16 to 25. This is because this is the main generation who play video games and is also the generation who use social media the most and are most likely to have more than one social media account. They are also likely to have steam/xbox/twitch/ps4 accounts that can be integrated into their profile. They are also likely to be competitive due to the gaming nature of the site.

D-Production plan/Timescales

This production scale gives me time to work on each element of the website whilst also including areas to get vital feedback for both peers teachers and the target market.

E- Launch date

The launch date is the 10th of November
This is so the website can grow and become polished enough to be good for Christmas and the new year. This is also the limit of time I have to work on the site along with the production of the various sections. This time also coincidences with the big releases before Christmas for the year.

F- Possible Revenue streams

There are three revenue streams that the website will use.

Advertising

The website will use normal google implemented adverts in the sidebar like most websites. This is likely to be one of the largest sources of revenue due to ease of implementation and upkeep.
It will also have advertisements in pre-roll to videos that last 10-30 seconds, This will be for larger videos only (3 mins or more).

Membership

The website will offer a membership package with two tiers. A silver tier is a package that other users can reward to each other and will have a few benefits such as being able to set custom colours for posts and the site. It will also have an ability to change text colour and size in comment sections.
It will also offer a Gold membership with users buy themselves. It enables all the stuff in the silver package with an added ability to make tournaments public as well as a custom background on their profile.

Promoted

There will also be promoted content that is featured such as posts in the feed and games promoted in the discover tab as well as promoted/sponsored tournaments.

G- Budget

Cost

Hosting- £40 A month on Go Daddy hosting. It could migrate to the Amazon AWS service which scales for the hosting cost with the website is large.
Coding- £1200  for a competent programmer to work on the design
Design- £1750 average wage a month

Overall cost for a month- £2920

Income

If the website gets around 1000 users in a hour this would turn into 10000 views. With the current CPM rate is £2 per 1000 views this would turn into £2 an hour. If you include video views with the same rate of 10000 videos an hour at £3 would give £3 an hour.
£5 an hour with £3,750 a month.
Including Membership of 100 users at £5 wouch give £500 a Month.
Sponsorship deals would also give profit on top

Overall Income for the month £4250

This comes to a £1330 profit a month for extra fees.

H- Legal and ethical issues

Legal
Hate Speech- One problem my site could face are users inciting hate onto others, to combat this I will add moderators for pages who can police content in their page/game. As well as a report function to get user moderators as well as In Game moderators to look at posts with a large amount of reports sent.
Copyrighted Content- To combat people posting content that is not theirs, they will use the report tool to mark a post as copyrighted and provide a link to the user or a email address who owns the right to the content to notify them to create a dispute.

Ethical
Free Speech- There is likely to be a problem with people posting controversial comments that don't violate the Terms of service. These need to be protected by use of the User Mods who have page rules that people must follow with disputes being taken up by the Website Mods.

I- Privacy and Security

There will be options in the setting to change your profile to public or to private. Along with this each post will be able to be changed from private or public, enabling people on the game page to see what you have posted.

J- Sitemap

K- Navigation Reasoning

The reason I am separating the site into sections like this is to have the larger set of information away from the homepage. I also want people to be able to go into different sections such as if they want to compete they can go into the Tournaments etc. I want the Discover page to be separated depending if they want to look for new games or people etc.
The target audience will want the different section to be clean, clear and easily accessible with a focus on creating each section to be unique. This uniqueness is key to appealing to the target audience with each page/profile/game hub being unique from one another creating a sense of community that will appeal to the target audience who are looking to communicate in groups, this is done through having different backgrounds, colours and separated pages that all create a feeling of a community whiles keeping the DNA of the InGame site so when others join it is clean that not only is it their small community but is also apart of the larger site, without sacrificing uniqueness in the games pages.