Othila Games
Game Price Comparison Platform
Co-Founder & Backend Developer
A Turkish-market game price comparison platform collecting daily prices across thousands of games and approximately 20–30 online stores. Grew to thousands of users without paid acquisition through community-driven distribution and partnerships with 10+ Twitch streamers.
Context
Othila Games was a Turkish-market game price comparison platform co-founded during university. The Turkish gaming market lacked a centralized tool for comparing game prices across the fragmented landscape of local and international digital stores. Gamers were manually checking multiple storefronts to find the best deal — a problem that scaled well into an automated comparison service.
Product
A web platform that aggregated daily prices across thousands of games and approximately 20–30 online stores in the Turkish market:
- Daily automated price scraping across ~20–30 online game stores
- Price history tracking and trend visualization
- Search and filtering across thousands of game titles
- Price alert notifications for user wishlists
- Store comparison and best-deal highlighting
- Game detail pages with multi-store pricing
Screenshots
Technical implementation
Built on .NET/C# with the MVC pattern and SQL Server for data persistence. The core technical challenge was building a reliable data pipeline that could scrape, normalize and store pricing data from dozens of stores with different page structures, currencies and availability patterns. The scraping system ran daily scheduled jobs to keep pricing current, with error handling and retry logic for unreliable store APIs and pages.
Growth and distribution
Grew to thousands of users without any paid acquisition. The primary distribution channels were community-driven: gaming forums, social media and partnerships with over 10 Turkish Twitch streamers who featured the platform to their audiences. This experience was an early lesson in product-market fit and community-driven growth — the product solved a real problem that users were willing to share organically.
Selected stack
What this project taught
- First experience building and shipping a product with real users
- Data engineering fundamentals: scraping, normalization, scheduled jobs
- Community-driven distribution without paid acquisition budget
- Co-founding dynamics and shared ownership of a product
- The gap between a working prototype and a product people actually use