Open Game Lobby

[somebody already took it]

Online mulitplayer games require some kind of lobby for users to organize and join games, and these lobbies are usually more or less the same. Furthermore, since it is possible to play games "in the cloud" now, there generally isn't a reason for lobbies to be used for only for a single game or small predefined collection of games. So I would like to propose a lobby web-service where any user can post arbitrary online muliplayer games for others to join and play. They should only need to provide a game description file (by URL or upload) that will contain some basic information about the game (The name of the game, a URL for the back-end, the number of players and any additional game parameters and acceptable values for them).
The idea seems pretty simple so I wouldn't be surprised if there is something like this out there already, finding that out is one of the main reasons I'm posting this. So far a few quick google searches haven't produced any results, but there is a lot of junk out there pertaining to browser based muliplayer games and I'm not really in the know when it comes to gaming.
To be clear I'm not interested in hosting a game lobby, but in using a pre-existing game lobby as a platform for creating a game.

[KnightExemplar]

Online mulitplayer games require some kind of lobby for users to organize and join games, and these lobbies are usually more or less the same. Furthermore, since it is possible to play games "in the cloud" now, there generally isn't a reason for lobbies to be used for only for a single game or small predefined collection of games. So I would like to propose a lobby web-service where any user can post arbitrary online muliplayer games for others to join and play. They should only need to provide a game description file (by URL or upload) that will contain some basic information about the game (The name of the game, a URL for the back-end, the number of players and any additional game parameters and acceptable values for them).
The idea seems pretty simple so I wouldn't be surprised if there is something like this out there already, finding that out is one of the main reasons I'm posting this. So far a few quick google searches haven't produced any results, but there is a lot of junk out there pertaining to browser based muliplayer games and I'm not really in the know when it comes to gaming.
To be clear I'm not interested in hosting a game lobby, but in using a pre-existing game lobby as a platform for creating a game.

I'm actually programming one, because I couldn't find one I liked. I'm not building off of the "lobby" concept however, but off of a "tournament" as the primitive.

Good luck on looking for one. I'm interested if there is any competition. Unfortunately, its only a hobby project, and I've spent a year on/off on it and barely move >_<. But I think I have good ideas (don't we all?), so I'll keep working on it until its done at least.

[somebody already took it]

I'm actually programming one, because I couldn't find one I liked. I'm not building off of the "lobby" concept however, but off of a "tournament" as the primitive.

I'm not sure what you mean by this, what's the difference between a "lobby" primitive and a "tournament" primitive?

[KnightExemplar]

A tournament must be organized. A lobby seems to imply a more loose group, not necessarily in a hierarchy. The organizer will say who plays who, set the rules, set the time, and someone to ultimately decide who wins and loses each match. So its a similar project, but I don't think my site (eventually... whenever I finish it) exactly matches your idea of a lobby. Nonetheless, I plan to have web-based chat-rooms (using hosted private XMPP accounts, so people can use PSI or another XMPP client if they want).

As stated before, its just vaporware right now. (Well, I'm nearing 2k lines of code, lol. Holy crap I suck at this). But I'm willing to share my ideas and experiences.

[FrederickSmith]

Could be proposed as a generic game lobby, not specific to any particular game, which has a server side that operates on a well known port, and a client side, which games would use to register their active game-specific servers. But there are Two(2) points to ponder:

1) not all games are required to have its own lobby (by having their own lobby UI, but not the lobby network code).

2) by having such a widely adopted standard for game lobbies, then even unpopular, obscure games can have good lobby service availability.

[KnightExemplar]

My perspective on that, is that the best Open Game lobby backbone would be XMPP.

Chat, Presence, Multi-user chat (aka: like IRC), accounts, and federation are all built in automatically if we build off of XMPP. Building an open game lobby protocol would be the primary issue.