Idea: Open Gaming Portal / Lobby-System

[Callum Lerwick]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Sven Pfaller <kalterregen at gmx.net> wrote:
> Hello everyone!
>
> Today I'd like to present you an idea concerning open and free games.
> I've sent this mail to two lists:
>  * Freedesktop Games: I guess it is _the_ list to talk about free games
>  * GGZ: comes closest to the project idea
>
> Some of you may have heard of the idea before as I was researching and
> hanging around in your IRC channels (as Noya).
>
> The last few days I was looking for an open game lobby system. I guess
> most of you will know Steam, Gamespy, Windows-Live and others. It seems
> as there is no real open alternative to those systems. Some place where
> I can see running gameservers of serveral games, chat with my friends,
> see what they are playing etc.

Yes, we need this. We already have the content delivery part down, but
we lack the community.

IMHO this should be handled as part of the Gnome Online Desktop effort:

http://live.gnome.org/OnlineDesktop

What we should probably do is lay out some use cases we want to see.
Like from Steam:

Friend starts playing Team Fortress 2. I get a popup alerting me that
"<name> is playing TF2"
I open my friends list, right click on their name, and click "Join".
TF2 automatically starts and connects me to the same game server
they're on.