Nunook community gaming network: how will users get hooked if they cannot register?

Community based gaming is growing at a fast clip in India. With majority of younger population hooked on to computers/ Internet more than ever before, this industry is set to grow even further.

Quite a few players have already set their foot firmly in this sector. Players like Indiagames, Zapak and Games2Win already command respectable user base. Additionally, other players like Indyarocks and FXlabs have made recent forays into this space.

Undoubtedly, community based gaming has a huge potential in India and the big names are set to exploit this potential growth.

I came to know about another startup in this space, when founder of Nunook mailed me about his startup. Here are my initial impressions.

The idea behind Nunook is a very good one – allowing users to compete against each other, creating your own unique avatars and in the process socializing and interacting with your friends.

I honestly was not too impressed as soon as I loaded the homepage (with quality of graphics and colours used). however, being a gaming site, one can understand heavy use of graphics.

I directly headed for the registration form so as to get the feel of what was on offer. Unfortunately Nunook just did not allow me to get registered.

In this day and age where building a community is the difference between success and failure, the entry point for users has to be as simple as possible, however the registration form presented was quite long having more than 10 fields.

After filling out all the information, I pressed ‘create account‘ and to my surprise it came back with error that “username should be between 2 and 50 characters”, whereas my selected username “trakin” was perfectly within the permissible norms.

To compound my problems I had to fill 5 fields all over again – password twice, gender, DOB (3 fields) and security code

I tried it again, and again I was unsuccessful. After 3 tries I gave up.

Here are my suggestions to founders of Nunook:

• The registration form should not have more than 4-5 fields for users to enter. They can fill all the demographic details later. Let them get in first !
• Get some quality games as well as quantity that will attract community. Currently there are only 10 games available. Comparatively, sites like Indiagames, Zapak and Game2Win have few hundreds of games available.
• The graphics on homepage really need to be of better quality.