GameCrush

Shortly after first launching their beta in March 2010, the GameCrush site went down. According to statements made by its management, it was overloaded with more connections than it could handle due to the high demand. It is reported that management said they were "overwhelmed with interest, and have smoking servers to prove it." It was claimed that the site received over 10,000 queries in five minutes of operation, overloading their servers and crashing their network. On June 5, 2010, GameCrush returned as a private, invitation-only beta.

BusinessWeek wrote an article describing GameCrush as "part social network, part online dating site, and a lot of Grand Theft Auto." The same article revealed the founders to be Eric Strasser, David Good, and Anees Iqbal. Strasser revealed that the site had more than 5,000 women and 1,000 men participating in its private beta.

In August 2010, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington revealed that GameCrush had raised $700,000 in an angel round featuring Scott Banister and his wife Cyan, among other angels and VCs. The public launch was loosely scheduled a month out from the article, September 2010.

On September 28, 2010, GameCrush launched its public site and presented as one of the six finalist companies at TechCrunch Disrupt.

In early 2011, GameCrush launched a free, random game matching engine called the "Crush-O-Matic." TechCrunch described the service as one that mined a vein similar to the video experience of Chatroulette but with cofounder Eric Strasser stating that "the site's registration requirement, user profiles and a user rating system help prevent" the rampant nudity found on that site.

After experimenting with various compensation models for the PlayDates, the site shut down in early 2013. In its place was a promotion for an upcoming site called "Buckme" that appears to have never launched.