Q&A With Adrian

#1 (**permalink**) February 24th, 2009, 00:28

Recently I sat down with Adrian after he agreed to do a Q&A session with me. If you recalled I asked your help in thinking of some questions to ask the owner of sites like PS3 Online Leaderboard with Playstation 3 Clan rank matches, game battles, tournaments, ladders for PS3 games including Call of Duty 4, MGS4 and Battlefield multiplayer and PS3 Multiplayer Online Games, just to name a few. Well here it is and I’m sure you’ll be excited to hear what’s to come!….
Q1) Ok, let’s start off by finding out how you and video games came together. What was your first gaming system and what was the first game AND online game you played?

A1) I can recall my excitement when my father brought home an early Console. It had Tennis, soccer and squash. It plugged into the back of our ‘Color’ television. The games on the screen were just light green and black, just made a beep and had a paddle controller which was rotated to move the little bar move up and down to hit the ‘ball’ back.. Actually it was a tiny square! Back then, there was not the pixel capacity to have circles!
I moved on the the ZX81, ZX Spectrum (Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner… great stuff) and eventually got a PC where I first got into serious gaming. I recall with some fondness games like Wing Commander, then I got the original Tomb Raider, Colin Mcrae Rally and a couple of Tom Clancy games though I can’t recall the names of them.
I then got a Playstation and particularly enjoyed Resident Evil, Point Blank, and Time Crisis with the Namco light guns. I then got an original Xbox and the magnificent Halo really opened my eyes to FPS games. To this day, I believe that was a breakthrough in gaming with its emphasis on chunky graphics and gameplay and certainly helped bring about the vast improvement in the games we now know and love.

Q2) What gave you the idea to start a gaming site and what did the site start out as?

A2) I own a limited company and video gaming was never actually part of it. However, I acquired a great domain name about 4 years ago called Playstation3.net. This was a year or so before the console would come out and I bought it as part of a huge domain name collection with a view to selling it on at a profit. One day I happened to notice it was getting good daily traffic from people looking for information on the console and at the time of its launch it really begged to be developed properly and I decided (typically of me) to not be content to do things small time and instead went about acquiring a dozen decent PS3 related domain names and building up a network. PS3 Multiplayer , PS3news.eu and PS3 Leaderboard came at first and they were joined by a few others including PS3videos.com. I still have about half a dozen PS3 domain names which I have never had time to develop. (Anybody interested in developing them, then please contact me for a partnership agreement!)

Q3) Did you ever expect to see that your sites would grow to be this big and to be this popular? I mean, well over 13 thousand members since the re-launch is pretty impressive.

A3) To be honest, the success of the sites really only came about by pure chance. It was really down to the fact that GB did not do a Call of Duty 3 ladder for whatever reason.Most of the COD3 players and clans from around the world came to the sites here in order to satisfy their need for battles. It was a great success and I was glad to help in an instrumental way. Things have moved on with COD4 and COD5 and of course GB has taken back over the whole show but I look back on those early days with a lot of fondness and pride.
Manually updating the early PS3 Leaderboard site was a nightmare though!!
I have never marketed the sites but relied on word of mouth. All this is really a hobby for me and on hindsight if I had thrown several thousand bucks at the network it would most likely me a lot bigger but also a lot less personal. As it is, the Multiplayer site simply cruises along and the Leaderboard site is going ballistic.

Q4) Favorite food, color, animal. GO!

A4) Crispy aromatic Duck, Blue, Tiger.

Q5) Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare or Call of Duty: World at War?

A5) COD3…. All the way. Then other two are tied.

Q6) Ok, one of the most IMPORTANT questions. With the sites growing daily and with ps3leaderboards.com starting tournaments this month, is there anything new or interesting in store for us in the near or distant future?

A6) EliteLadders.com are releasing their new gaming script and this will give us an even better site plus an ability to have pay-to-enter cash prize ladders and tournaments so look out for those.
PlayStation 3 console and games sales online - Buy PS3 games, USB controllers and purchase SONY Playstation accessories. is going to be redeveloped substantially to offer a PS3 related store with skins for sale as well as games and accessories. We will provide coupons for discounts to members of the network who ‘perform’ well on our network ladders and tournaments.
Also, big news. PS3Multiplayer is getting it’s own integrated Ladder and Tournaments system and will eventually become a standalone site. This is because PS3Leaderboard is growing really fast and seems to be heading in a new direction and may well in fact join forces with other platform sites and try to become a rival to GB. This will pave the way for PS3Multiplayer to grow by itself and focus on the community. So..PS3Leaderboard members may well be at the ground level for a future HUGE site. Keep an eye on this site and of course, business will continue as normal on PS3Leaderboards.

Once again, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this, it’s greatly appreciated. Also, I’d like to say thanks to giving us the most fair and most fast-growing gaming site out there.

Well, its certainly up there as the largest independently owned PS3 –ONLY- niche website in the world.. Still, costs me an arm and a leg though but never mind that!

Read original session at PS3 News

balzan · #2 (**permalink**) February 24th, 2009, 04:39

niiiice!!! nice1 jon and adrian

rly liked it tbh, wouldnt mind a pic

anyway, nice, so excited for the integrated ladders in the site. so good, thanks to all admins and mods, and all hidden people to giev us what we have, well done