A friend of mine just announced the beta launch of his new service for gamers, Planbeast. It’s a free matchmaking service for coordinating games on Xbox Live. In Jason McIntosh’s own words:
In a nutshell, Planbeast lets you use the web to schedule times that you’d like to play your favorite Xbox 360 games online. You can use RSS or iCal to know when other fans of these same games set up matches of their own, which you can then join as a guest. When the time comes to play a scheduled game, everyone who has opted-in for notification receives an email or an IM telling them who’s playing, and how to get started.Xbox Live is a very clever and robust online game network, but – like all the major such networks – its “matchmaking” functionality is rather wanting. Depending on the game, trying to play online with strangers usually means either finding nobody at all online, or finding yourself playing with unsavory sorts. Planbeast aims to help this by connecting fans of games with one another, and letting a game’s online players know who and what to expect from the other folks at the table.
Keep in mind that this is still very much in beta. But do feel free to check out his site! I would… if my Xbox were hooked up to the internet, and, oh, I dunno, I actually enjoyed multiplayer games.
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