Rightside (Nasdaq: NAME), today announced it has secured the .GAMES domain extension.
Rightside plans to launch .GAMES in Q3 2016, starting at a standard wholesale price of $12.00.
Donuts was the sole applicant for .Games, which is one of the jointly owned new gTLD domain extensions with Rightside.
There were 5 applicants for the new gTLD .Game, including Google and Amazon, which was won by Uniregistry in a private auction.
.Game which was originally scheduled to be launched late last year, will be launching into Sunrise starting this week. .Game will launch into the Early Access Program (EAP) on May 17th, and General Availability (GA) on May 24th with two price tiers a $300 registration, annual renewal rate or a $1,300 registration + annual renewal rate.
Based on other Rightside new gTLD extensions, I would expect premium .Games domains to carry premium prices.
In its press release announcing .Games “The .GAMES extension will offer gamers, publishers, game developers, and retailers the opportunity to distinguish themselves with short, relevant, and memorable web addresses. For example, a .GAMES domain name, such as Twitch.games, Zynga.games or yourname.games, enables a brand or individual to lock in a modern domain name and proudly claim their game identity online.”
“Rightside said it “believes .GAMES fits nicely into its portfolio of domain names like .LIVE, .SOCIAL, and .NEWS, which are being rapidly embraced to showcase popular Internet culture. For example, YouTube stars like Joe Rogan (1.85 million Twitter followers) use .LIVE to drive traffic to his stream and Al Roker now uses a Rightside domain, RokerMedia.live. People with major Periscope followings, such as Ryan A. Bell (Ryan.live) and Brian Fanzo (iSocialFanz.live) use the .LIVE domain to house all their accounts under a single brand, and they can quickly change where the domain points to make sure people have access to their content. In addition, traditional publishers like the Los Angeles Times, to Alphabet’s unfiltered.news, or Now This Media’s use of election.news have embraced TLDs to showcase themselves as source of current events, trends, and information.”
Horrible pricing structures in the past, they know how to kill a launch
Well, I’ve watched one domain under .game go from a price listing of $49 to $300 to $500 to $1900 to around $3000
Dear Jane, please refrain from insulting our collective intelligence. When people say .crap like that without providing the actual URL, it is most likely not true. Just sayin’.
Doesn’t really matter what the domain is, nor do I care for your collective intelligence one way or the other.
I refrained from mentioning the domain because I was interested in it and wanted to see where the pricing ended up just in case it dipped to a price point I was happier with, not to mention what renewal was going to be seeing as .game was previously slated for release before they decided to delay.
As it stands it was just registered so it is all a moot point for that specific domain, though other domains that have been listed as premium all seem to be on the same price point so I will be keeping an eye on those to see if the price fluctuates further.
Cheapest GA looks to be around $300 which you can confirm yourself by doing a search for a crap name and not simply take my word for it.