I have been thinking about how best the indie game community can break the stranglehold that the 'big' websites (Gamespy, BluesNews, Ve3D,Gamespot etc) seem to have over the distribution of news and information to gamers.
When you release an indie game, you probably do what I do, send out a big bunch of emails and Press releases to all of the websites out there, and spend the next week or so checking their news pages without much luck at all in seeing your news posted.
The only places you can guarantee some coverage are those sites based around games development, such as GameDev, Madmokey etc.
I reckon this inability to 'Get Noticed' is one of the main things that is holding back a lot of quality indie games from potentially good sales.
So the question is how do we persuade BluesNews that the release of one of our games is more important than the news that "Triple A game 'X' is pushed back another 3 months". I find it sad that the non-release of a big budget game is more newsworthy than the actual release of a smal budget one.

I would like to hear peoples views on how best to break out from this 'indie-dead-end' that we find ourselves in publicity wise.
It can't JUST be a matter of money spent on advertising that gets a game noticed, there must be other ways?

I have made it my policy to always swap links with as many quality indie games as possible, but that only tempts people to my site who are themselves already open to the indie scene, the real aim is to get joe bloggs who is browsing AOL to come try out my games. How do we do this?

Maybe we need one of these small indie games sites to break into the mass market so we can all get behind them (not a publisher like dexterity, that defeats the object of being an impartial site instead of just a marketplace for one company)?
Maybe we need to swap more information among ourselves on what does and does not work marketing wise?
Maybe we need to actually club together and put some money into a collective marketing/advertising effort?
Maybe we need to get together and persistenly badger the big sites into featuring smaller games, and if one of us does get mentioned, the rest of us should send supportive emails/forum postings to let the sites know that these games DO deserve their attention?

Obviously I don't have the answers, but I think this is a topic we would all benefit from thinking about.

I don't have a solution to this, but there are a few things I would like to add to the mix:


* A lot of the big game site reviewers get major back-handers for giving coverage to big publisher's games. There is no way indies, even if they clubbed together, could ever match this.


* Most if not all of the big game sites know that their audience is more interested in the next Harry Potter spinoff than a completely original indie game. Yes, that sucks but it's true. No matter how much -WE- might say that gameplay is more important than amazing graphics, big game site readers will take a trilinear filtered, vertex shaded, bump mapped MRM world over a great puzzle game any day.


* Big game sites are not evil. They don't give us much coverage because they don't care about us, not because they hate us. And they don't care because they think their readers don't care.


To put the big game sites into context: When was the last time you were watching CNN, and heard about some kid who has wrote and directed a stage play at the community theatre at age 12? Probably never. Because while his play might have been an absolute masterpiece, the CNN producers know that their viewers would much rather hear about how Woody Harrelson was arrested for assaulting another photographer.


"Give the public what they want" This is the phrase that pays for big media companies, regardless of the format.

here's a really stupid idea that i've
been mulling over for years more so
for my publishing site than the development one.....

why don't we all(indies) chip in and buy us
a full page ad in say.....gamedeveloper magazine
where the ad features the company logos and
website URLS of those who contributed....

or better yet a full page ad in a more general
computing magazine.....

the idea is that we all do this every so often until
we start receiving some decent results.....
that would surely generate a buzz with journalists
and the writing press i'm sure.....

i'd do it all by myself just to see the result....but oh well like
i said it was just an idea.....;)

i'd be interested in hearing any other ideas.

What might be slightly better is an organization of indies. Each member (indie) could pay dues that go to maintain a central web page designed for the soul purpose of advertising each members personal/business web site. The dues could also be used to fund advertising like full page adds in popular magazines, etc that bring people to the central web page. This would make it much easier on the customer since they would only have to remember a single url from the advertisement. Once at the central web page the user could check out any of the members' games and purchase them through the member's personal/business web page. In essence the members would be pulling their money together to fund advertising.

On the other hand, this arrangement could be problematic. Many questions arise like the order the members are listed on the central web page. Should a publisher like dexterity pay more dues since they would be advertising more games then an individual (with a single game)? Are dues based per game or per member? Who designs the adds? etc.

Maybe thats why it hasn't been done.

Originally posted by BioDeathWalker
What might be slightly better is an organization of indies. Each member (indie) could pay dues that go to maintain a central web page designed for the soul purpose of advertising each members personal/business web site. The dues could also be used to fund advertising like full page adds in popular magazines, etc that bring people to the central web page. This would make it much easier on the customer since they would only have to remember a single url from the advertisement. Once at the central web page the user could check out any of the members' games and purchase them through the member's personal/business web page. In essence the members would be pulling their money together to fund advertising.

a neat additional idea.

On the other hand, this arrangement could be problematic. Many questions arise like the order the members are listed on the central web page. Should a publisher like dexterity pay more dues since they would be advertising more games then an individual (with a single game)? Are dues based per game or per member? Who designs the adds? etc.

Possible Solutions: Arrange the members in Alphabetical
order based on the genre that their game falls under.
dues would be based per member with a free ad for their initial
games......subsequent game ads could be added for a nominal fee

who designs the ads? the webmaster and/or any member who
would desire to help of course......


stop lurking people, what do you think?
contribute some ideas.

Order of the members' games shouldn't be alphabetical otherwise you'll get a lot of games named with numbers and A's.

If they were in alpha order then a 'features page' would probably be needed. Maybe on the home page have a daily rotation of games that are featured. That way everyone gets some high level exposure on the site.

This may not be a popular opinion but I think that the first step toward promoting indie games online is by having unbiased 3rd parties do the reviewing. I think DIYGames (http://www.DIYgames.com) is off on a great start in this regard. To my knowledge the editor doesn't have any of his own games on the market that he's subtly trying to advertise along side the content that he's offering. People are remarkably perceptive when it comes to advertising. They know when what they are looking at is carefully crafted marketing or an opinion of an unbiased third party.

For Indie games to get legitimacy they need to have some credibility. They need objective people reviewing them and the reviewers to be untainted and uncensored by the Indie developers.

It's not only important to give consumers reliable information about Indie games; they also have to know where to find that information. In order for a site like DIY to be really useful it must optimize it's site for search engines and not stop until it is ranked high enough in the search engines that the AOL crowd will find it.
Frankly I think that an objective site like DIY has a larger chance of getting viewers then one where all the reviews are written by the developers and the site is covered with advertising for their own games. People don't say, "hey check out this cool site I found with daily propaganda from developers trying to sell their games by telling about how good their games are". It's much more realistic for them to say "hey, check out this site, it's got a lot of objective reviews of various Indie games available online."

While this may be painful for Indie developers in the short term because not all games are going to receive high praise from independent reviewers. The benefits of such a system outweigh the bad in my opinion. If all our review sites are crafted marketing schemes we will end up making our budding industry appear to be founded on the same principles of the Top 10 porn/wares/mp3 sites who spend all their time advertising each other and linking to each other. In the short term this may up site views for the parties involved but after a while consumers will just close any page they recognize as an “Indie game marketing” page because they know it’s just advertising with no “real” content. Consumers wont take us seriously.

However, if we can establish legitimacy with objective sites with no hidden marketing agenda we can bring a lot more people to the market and keep them. People will return to a site with news and objective reviews, but they will rarely return to a marketing site unless they are already very interested in the market. Honestly, do we really want all our games presented as masterful pieces of perfection? Wouldn’t it be better to let a 3rd part compare and review our games so we could get some real indication of how well they stand up against other Indie games.

Without this legitimate feedback it becomes very difficult for us to as a community to improve the quality of our games. For one we aren’t really sure how well our game is received by the public because every game appears to have equally high praise on all the Indie news (disguised marketing) sites. Secondly because there would be no legitimacy in the community, there would be very little impetus for improving and creating superior products as it wouldn’t matter because the poorly designed crappy game on the page next to yours is also rated 5/5 stars.

The Indie game industry needs legitimacy, not just marketing to be successful. Organizing Indies and collecting pools of money to increase marketing will only have a short-term affect at best. Once a consumer realizes what he is looking at is advertising or marketing they tend to discount it very quickly. However if there are consistently reliable sources of legitimate information about Indie games that are readily available to Joe Consumer there's a much better chance of increasing exposure of the Indie scene over the long term.

Once this legitimacy is established, I think we can move on to how increase the visibility of the Indie industry as well as our own games, but we need to focus on legitimacy first.

dan:
the legitimacy will come as a result of the marketing.
who better to inform everyone that indie developers
exist other than the indie developers themselves?
i think it's better to legitimize ourselves through marketing
or any other available means rather than wait for
someone else to do it....

also i think one of the previous points was to have a "central"
place on the web for such an endeavor...started by indies at least.

on a more general note,
i'll use my case as an example......
i make computer games.
i produce CDRoms that have indie demos on them.
i have a physical brick store that people come to.
i give these cd's to the people that come here.
i think that it would be stupid of me to not put any of my
demos onto the cdrom along with the others
since.....well...it's my store.
but in my case.....the overall focus is "not" on my games, but
what's on the cd collectively from the developers who submit demos.
now....having reviews and such featured on the cdrom as
demonstrated by DIY would be a nice addition to what i do....
but i generally type them into a text file print them out
and hand them to those who walk in......
those who come back are interested in knowing
what else has been released.
i'm interested to know whether that's considered
slick marketing/propaganda.

Originally posted by GLIPSEntertainment

the legitimacy will come as a result of the marketing.
who better to inform everyone that indie developers
exist other than the indie developers themselves?

I think Indie developers should absolutely be trying to let the world know they exist. It's critical to their survival and makes good business sense. They should be optimizing their sites, submitting demos for reviews, getting their games out in front of people. Making a connection with the community of people who play Indie games.

This not only increases the visibility of the developer but also the Indie community at large.

What I don't think Indie developers should be doing is getting together with a little one hand washes the other mentality and agree to post favorable reviews about their own or each others games on a central "Indie news/reviews" site in order to increase downloads and visits to their own sites. This type of site would rapidly become irrelevant in consumers minds when the realize that no Indie game posted on the site ever gets a bad review and the reviewers always recommend you download and buy the game. Not only that the site seems to be littered with "Buy Now" and "Free Demo" links splattered all over the site trying to entice viewers to impulse buy.

The thing I have a problem with is Indies creating a site posing as a news/review site and then posting biased reviews that suite their own agendas and try to pawn them of as legitimate reviews to entice users to download/buy games of Indie developers who belong to that site.

Originally posted by GLIPSEntertainment
i'm interested to know whether that's considered
slick marketing/propaganda.

Firstly I must apologize for the tone of my first post. I have a tendency to become patronizing and preachy when I feel strongly about a topic. I’m not sure why I do this and it is a habit I’m actively trying to break.

No I don’t think your marketing tactics are underhanded marketing propaganda. I think of it in much the same way I would consider giving away a free demo CD to visitors of my site that included Indie demos as well as my own. This is perfectly valid self-promotion as well as doing a favor to other Indies by getting their games out in front of consumers as well. It would be stupid to give away CD’s of other peoples games and not include your own ;) Also, consumers expect things like free demos of your game from your site, the will most likely be appreciative of the other demos they receive.

What I think is wrong is if I were to belong to this central Indie website where I paid dues and got my game “reviewed”. Knowing full well that regardless of the quality of my game I would get a positive review. Then on my website I post quotes from that review to entice players to download my game. It would be similar to you opening another store down the street that published a magazine reviewing games. In that magazine and to people who came to your store you told them that the game in your other store (that you created) was amazing and definitely worth checking out. This might work once or twice before customers recognized your bias and the link between your magazine store and your game store. After that they would completely disregard any recommendations from your magazine because they are aware that it’s just a clever marketing ploy.

I’m trying to make a case for honesty and legitimacy in how we market our community and our products. It’s very difficult for Indie developers to increase awareness of all the games in the Indie market without being biased. If they review other games favorably people can accuse them of performing business courtesies amongst Indie developers. If they do a negative review people will accuse them of negatively reviewing games that compete with them for customers. It’s a no win situation.

If Indie developers stick to marketing their own games and leave the marketing of the Indie community to 3rd parties like DIYgames we all stand to win. As developers we can focus on marketing our own products and collecting quote from legitimate sources as opposed to ones we invented. We can indirectly increase awareness of the community by linking to 3rd party “community” sites like DIY so that people who our sites can trickle down and gain exposure to the rest of the community. You want to leave a good taste in the mouth of the customers who are curious about the community.

If you re-direct them to a community site maintained by developers advertising their own wares it’s bound to leave a bad taste in their mouth. However if you re-direct them to an objective Indie site with reviews and news that are based on reality as opposed to fluffy marketing jargon game reviews, their bound to return and check out some of the other games the community has to offer.

I think you might be confusing 'marketing' with 'reviews'. I agree with you that if there were some kind of indie funded central site there shouldn't be reviews posted there. Its pretty much self advertising that decieves the reader into thinking its unbiased.

However, I do think that a central indie site could be of benefit to drive people too indie sites. Once there you can give them links to outside reviews (like those from DIY). The purpose is not to self review but to make the general public aware that we exist and give them an easy way to find us. I'd bet lots of people wouldn't mind purchasing a few of the indie games around if they knew they existed.

I wonder how well something like that would work. I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but there is an ongoing debate in the ASP right now about use of the word shareware, and whether or not it puts customers off. It was mentioned that the ASP used to pour a lot of money into promoting shareware to the general public, trying to educate people about what it is, and get them interested in it. It didn't prove to be very successful. There are a lot of parallels to what you have proposed. Convincing people that we exist is a bit difficult when you have all these big publishers throwing around millions of dollars saying that we don't...that they are THE source for great games.

That said, I'm not opposed to trying if the right plan comes up.

I put some thought into this and I had a hard time visualizing what such a site would look like.

I did have one idea though. What if the page was something of a tutorial/introduction to Indie gaming, a site that had a little of the roots of the Indie movement as well as its aspirations. Some links and articles about different games and the examples of games from different genera’s that Indie developers have created. In essence it would be a site that takes someone with no knowledge of the Indie gaming scene and brings them up to speed with what's available, who the developers and publishers are, and a taste of what it's like to be an Indie developer.

Developers could post little articles about their experiences, and generally try to reach out to people in a way only independent developers can.

There are pitfalls to a community site however, because in our desire to put our best foot forward we may inadvertently discriminate against “less experienced” members of the community who want to be apart of the site and share their wildly ambitious title that will revolutionize the industry with the world.

It’s impossible to please all the people all the time and it’s especially hard to please me as I tend to be over critical ;) Not to replace the community site idea, but here’s a suggestion that runs parallel to it. Dexterity is rapidly becoming a forum where the Indie community gathers. It has a wide user base and is already optimized to bring in new customers. Admittedly their game distribution is slightly tilted towards a particular genera, and they are exclusive about what games they display (and they are justified in doing so IMO). I think Dexterities site has a good taste of some of the better aspects of the Indie community, in the short term it seems like an ideal site to use to increase awareness about the Indie game community? Just a thought, feel free to criticize ;)

It was important what Ron said about the term "shareware". Even if we can argue that it is not a mark of quality we can not deny that in the eyes of the public it is. Changing this preconception can be next to impossible. I think it would probably be better to just drop the terms "Independent" or "Shareware" if it misleads the public. If we have a great game we don't want to lie to someone about it, do we?

Can't this "education" mentality be dangerous in a more general sense? Instead of just selling our product we force the customer to accept our values as well. Is that not discriminatory?

I think the term "Independent" is not that value loaded yet. But to keep it that way we definetly need unbiased opinions as Dan pointed out. Does anyone of you have a good opinion what the image of "independent" is at the moment? Not only for games but generally for all content?

Originally posted by cliffski
I have been thinking about how best the indie game community can break the stranglehold that the 'big' websites (Gamespy, BluesNews, Ve3D,Gamespot etc) seem to have over the distribution of news and information to gamers.

There are certain indie friendly sites out there. Avault, for example, frequently posts indie game demos and even has reviews from indie developers from time to time. One of our categories for the first annual DIY Awards will be for the mainstream gaming news site that is the most indie friendly(obviously we need a real name for that category, heh).

A couple of the major gaming mags are pretty receptive as well, so long as the games are not puzzle or arcade shooters. Computer Games magazine, for example, is said to be working on a preview of They Came From Hollywood for an upcoming issue. That's a big deal, no doubt about that, but look at how long the game has been in production.

Originally posted by cliffski
Maybe we need to swap more information among ourselves on what does and does not work marketing wise?
Maybe we need to actually club together and put some money into a collective marketing/advertising effort?
Maybe we need to get together and persistenly badger the big sites into featuring smaller games, and if one of us does get mentioned, the rest of us should send supportive emails/forum postings to let the sites know that these games DO deserve their attention?

I think those are all great ideas. But the problem with indies is that they're so independent. :) It's similar to some problems Dan was talking about earlier, indies are so die hard about doing it themselves sometimes that they fail to see the big picture. Some seem to think that if they can't do everything themselves then there is something wrong with their games.

Originally posted by GLIPSEntertainment
why don't we all(indies) chip in and buy us
a full page ad in say.....gamedeveloper magazine
where the ad features the company logos and
website URLS of those who contributed....

The rates in Game Developer are actually pretty reasonable, I have a rate book from them somewhere around here but can't seem to find it. I realize you may have been just using Game Developer as an example, but they wouldn't be the best choice of places to advertise in my opinion. If you're looking to grab the attention of gamers (especially casual gamers) then you would better suited to choosing a general interest magazine that has an entertainment/technology section. Hell, you could spend a couple grand and get a 30 second spot on CNN if you want to get really nuts. But I'm certainly not a marketing guy. :)

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
This may not be a popular opinion but I think that the first step toward promoting indie games online is by having unbiased 3rd parties do the reviewing. I think DIYGames (http://www.DIYgames.com) is off on a great start in this regard. To my knowledge the editor doesn't have any of his own games on the market that he's subtly trying to advertise along side the content that he's offering. People are remarkably perceptive when it comes to advertising. They know when what they are looking at is carefully crafted marketing or an opinion of an unbiased third party.

Thanks for the compliments :) And you're right, I'm not working on any kind of game.. not enough talent! And you're right about people picking up on those tooting their own horn. A few months ago I was searching for some indie sites and was getting sick to tell you the truth. It got tedious seeing sites that had nothing but praise for every game. There's very little objectivity on the indie gaming news scene, and that just serves to hurt the developers and consumers. Developers are hurt because they don't know they created a poor game. Consumers are hurt because they believed the hype the first couple times and got stuck with a copy of a game they played ten years ago. It just drives everyone away.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
For Indie games to get legitimacy they need to have some credibility. They need objective people reviewing them and the reviewers to be untainted and uncensored by the Indie developers.

I think you're right about that as well. I would love to see 10 indie gaming news and reviews sites run by people not involved in making games. Hell, I would love for there to be an indie.ign.com website. Objective reviews are important, no doubt about that. The problem is that indie games are all over the chart when it comes to artistic quality(music, graphics etc). I think it's fair to say that a game like Hateful Chris would get high marks for its graphics, but what about something like Strange Adventures In Infinite Space? The graphics are low res to say the least, but they are entirely appropriate to the game. Things like this don't come into play nearly as much when reviewing mainstream games(in my experience). Once we start posting our reviews (this weekend) I figure i'll get my share of hatemail from gamers and developers alike. And I'm sure i'll get the cold shoulder from certain developers once we objectively look at their product. Hell, it's not a popularity contest.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
In order for a site like DIY to be really useful it must optimize it's site for search engines and not stop until it is ranked high enough in the search engines that the AOL crowd will find it.

Funny you should mention that. Our web guy is a fanatic about that. It'll take some time, but I'm confident we'll get to a pretty high ranking. Getting our features linked on other sites is going to be a big part of the puzzle I think. We may not be able to get Avault to post about an indie demo we're hosting, but when we do an interview on Dave Grossman(for example) there isn't much of a problem getting linked at Sharky, or Blues, or many other sites, and we just went live. Most these guys refuse to link you unless you've been around for a long time.

One example that's still paying off posting stories about piracy. On an old game site I worked on we would regularly post stories about piracy busts and such. It would get linked in some piracy web board and suddenly traffic would go through the roof (much more so than getting linked on blues, gaminggroove, voodoo, and fark all at once). The traffic would stay very consistent too. Hell, we still get people reading our interview with Paul Owen from Neo Technologies (makers of a PS2 mod chip).

Follow-up comments.

I agree about the idea of impartial reviews, and agree that all these sites praising all games to the stars aren't the ideal solution

I also agree that you don't want to preach to the converted, GameDeveloepr mag readers, or the readers of Gamedev. We want AOL users who are just starting to look at online games.

I am pretty opposed to building any kind of general Indie community around Dexterity. I have nothing against them at all, I think they are doing a fantastic job, and this board has been extremely usefull, but Dexterity are there to make money from Indie games, its impossible to have objectivity about what games (and genres) are good and bad when you are so tied into a major indie publisher like Dexterity.

So the question remains what DO we do? I think the consensus is heading towards DIYGames as being the current site of choice? normally I'd put a big fat link to them on my site right away, but I keep 'backing the wrong horse' I thought MadMonkey.net would be the break-out site for indies, buts is aimed at developers, then I thought downloadpal.com would, but its mainly a competitor for download.com. Is DIYGames the site that will break into the mainstream?
I hope so, but I think all of us on this board need to decide how to proceed, then act together (in supplying content and links).

I'm glad the topic is getting discussed, there was a similar drive years ago on gamedev, but nothing ever came of it, lets make it a success this time around.

I think the group advertising idea is the best option. We have to let people know our games are out there somehow. One of the angles I think we should push is that our games are different from your standard AAA games. The main reason I stopped playing games and started learning how to write them was that AAA titles had become stale and boring. So perhaps we can attract the market that has grown out of games by offering them new experiences.

I am very anti reviewers because all they are is one person offering their opinion. If that person prefers one genre, then the other games tend to get poor reviews. In my city the people that review games (for the news paper) are 3D FPS fans and they give scathing reviews of 2D games similar in look to Baldur's Gate because they say they look too cartoonish.

As for a general website for Indie games I think it would be fair to have rotating lists of games and an independent review system. Also you could charge people a flat rate for each game they place on the site.

The review system could be similar to the one at Amazon.com. However the major difference should be: Only paying customers are allowed to review the games they bought and paid for. This way you would get honest reviews by people who are fans of a game’s genre.

Originally posted by Gmicek
On an old game site I worked on we would regularly post stories about piracy busts and such. It would get linked in some piracy web board and suddenly traffic would go through the roof (much more so than getting linked on blues, gaminggroove, voodoo, and fark all at once). The traffic would stay very consistent too. Hell, we still get people reading our interview with Paul Owen from Neo Technologies (makers of a PS2 mod chip).

Except that I'm not sure how likely that is to be helpful. If these people are warez fans, what are the chances they are actually going to buy indie games? Unless they card it of course (which is worse than "not-helpful", its actually harmful when the developer gets a chargeback).

By the way, I signed up for an account on DIY games yesterday but I never recieved the welcome email with my password. I sent an email to Cedric about it, so if you could just make sure he knows about it, I would appreciate it.

I think the idea of changing peoples' perception of indie games is interesting. Perhaps what is needed is to try and create a buzz. Tell people there is a change in the air. I don't actually believe it is creating a false impression either. The number of developers creating quality small games is much larger than I thought before this forum exists, There are a lot of us out there.

Things that people should know are...

These games exist.
They are much more varied in type than the games you will find in your average comuter game store.
They are often cheaper.
The quality can be supurb
[feel free to add to this list]

It is probably worth Deliberately avoiding the AAA tag for large budget, retail games. The implication is that this is a high quality title where in reality it means several million was spent on this game. Distinuishing ourselves from these games by saying we are not AAA implies an inferior product when in fact we are merely different. There are several small (and indeed several free) games that I would rate significantly better than some of the AAA crap that has passed my way.

I agree that before any major attempt to swing people towards indie games, there should be a lot of groundwork done first. If we tell people there are a lot of indie games out there then there should be ways for them to find them easily. DIYGames is looking pretty good here but it needs time. to gather reviews, listings, and so forth.

For something to be valuable to the casual visiter though it would require a better search mechanism. There should be a quick search where people can get a selection of games in the category that they are interested in. The current system is more for enthusiasts and people generally interested in the scene. Someone looking to find a game to play isn't really interested in games that are in development.

Anyhoo...
Rather than magazine ads, a posibility is that you could just talk to anyone who will listen about the growing indie game community. Say it often enough and people will take it in, or so the theory goes. I'm no marketing guru but most news these days is news by virtue of someone making it news. We just need to make ourselves news. How? I don't know, that's someone elses job. I admit it, I'm useless :p

My first concern about any type of *coalition* is who makes the final call on anything and everything.

I'd be willing to pay member dues and such to help build an independent game promotion site.

I like BioDeathWalker idea of a group supporting large advertisement(s) to a central website where all members get equal promotion.

Reviews should be independent. Either by one or two individuals, or by the visitors of the website.

I agree with the central Indie website. I think all indie developers can get together for this. Here are my thoughts on the topic.

Reviews - It is based on the person who is playing the game and their particular likes and dislikes. Though sites like DIYGames are doing a good job, the majority are not the same. As discussed above, we could set up a site which lists the links for the indie game websites. But this alone should not be the function of the wesite.

I think we should let the people who play the game rate it. We could have different parameters for them to rate(but it should not be very Elaborate, thus wasting their time) about the game and add their personal comments. This site could be a review site "For the Players, By the Players" (I couldn't resist it :D ). This way we get recognition and this web site could be advertised. This gives a lot of credibility as the PLAYERS are rating the games. This way the others get many opinions and lets them decide on purchasing the games. Agreed, it may not be pleasant to all, few of the games may get bad reviews if they are bad. But lets face it, it would be honest and will only help us in the long run.

And how do we get people to rate the games ? Not many are willing to do it . So as steve discussed in his articles, we should give them incentives for doing so. Maybe a draw at the end of the month gives discounts to purchase games from the listed sites for a few lucky winners. There can be other incentives also.
Just a few of my thoughts. This is one topic i had been thinking for a long time. I am glad it is being discussed here.

People who are just browsing this and who haven't shared their thoughts, Please do so. We need to help each other.

This is a fascinating thread....

It would be interesting if we could form some kind of indie organization, similar to the ASP but focused on games. However, the ASP focuses mainly on providing information and sharing knowledge, and there are already many places indies have for this.

I think what people would love to see is the ability to market the concept of indie itself ... to promote the indie mystique to the public, to increase awareness about the innovation and originality of indie games. This is tough. Part of the problem is that indie doesn't mean quality. The same is true for shareware. While there are great indie games and great shareware, the vast majority of both are low quality. Of course, the same can be said of retail software.... So it makes more sense for individual companies to promote their own games.

Being a for-profit business, Dexterity needs to continue to make a profit to survive. So those who say we're biased are correct, since I do have a profit motive in running the business. We have to continue to make sales. I have to pay expenses like office rent, payroll, taxes, insurance, hosting/bandwidth costs, royalties, etc. And all those costs are ultimately paid for by players who buy games.

We're also a small company though, 100% of which is still owned by me, so we don't have any outside investors to satisfy. And we're debt-free. Since making money isn't my primary motive for existing, I still have the freedom to do things (and to have Dexterity do things) that aren't motivated by profit, such as writing articles, volunteering in trade orgs, and putting up this ad-free message board.

One problem the indie community as a whole has is a lack of resources... i.e. money. Money isn't everything, but nothing can take the place of money in the area in which money works. Look at what GameDev.net is doing with the Radeon ads. They have to do this because of lack of money. If they had a strong, steady cashflow, they wouldn't have to do such things that annoy their visitors. This is a problem that money can solve.

So while Dexterity is biased on the one hand, it also has some resources on the other hand. Because we are making a profit, we can afford to do certain things for no profit, paying for them out of sales. A few hundred dollars here and there doesn't really make much difference.

So should Dexterity try to build up its own indie site? Tough question. We have a reliable dedicated server with all the bells and whistles, a mostly empty 20GB hard drive, and plenty of bandwidth capacity. We can setup and host new domains for no additional cost, and hosting an extra site that got 10GB of monthly traffic would be cheap enough. We could probably afford to subsidize all this and even keep the site ad-free. So money wouldn't be the main obstacle. The main problem would be the manpower needed to build and maintain the site.

But if we own and control the site, then it wouldn't really be independent. But what site is independent?

Is there any interest here in forming some sort of indie trade organization?

Originally posted by gana
And how do we get people to rate the games ? Not many are willing to do it . So as steve discussed in his articles, we should give them incentives for doing so. Maybe a draw at the end of the month gives discounts to purchase games from the listed sites for a few lucky winners. There can be other incentives also.
Some sort of incentive might be nice, but really I think it wouldn't be needed if the website got enough traffic. Most people are more than willing to give their opinion on something. ;) Just make sure that incentives aren't based on how much reviewing you do; or if it is, cap it off at something low like 1 or 2 per month (ie, if don't make at least 2 reviews in a month, you aren't eligable for the draw). Otherwise, you'll have to contend with lots of people who will gladly 'rate' game after game without even bothering to play it, just to get better incentives.

Originally posted by Dexterity
But if we own and control the site, then it wouldn't really be independent. But what site is independent?
Is there any interest here in forming some sort of indie trade organization?
The meaning of 'independent' being, more or less: 'not bias to some large corporate agenda.' Or, in other words, a fair, open, and honest community. And I'm pretty sure anyone here would agree that you guys are nothing if not fair, open, and honest.

Being the generous type that I am, I think it could a potentially great idea; although I don't think there is much I could offer to help with, outside of server space and bandwidth (of which I have quite a bit). Just remember that the site needs to keep a cunsumer-oriented feel much as possible! There are already a dozen game developer websites out there and I think that, really, it shouldn't even need a developer section outside of submissions and links to other developer-oriented sites.

By the way, all this talk reminds me of an existing site, to some extent : http://www.gamehippo.com/. Game Hippo's drawback is that it is for freeware games only (no shareware, no demos, of any sort). But, it is very consumer-oriented, has by-the-player rating systems, and gets a lot of traffic and downloads. The one thing it doesn't have that I think would be cool in our case is feature articles and stuff.

- Air
- Hour 13 Studios (http://www.hour13.com)

An organization of indies seems a bit oxymoronic to me...

The ASP survives because it knows what it's members want: commisseration of shared miseries and sharing of what works and what fails miserably.

"Indie" is a marketing label only to hardcore people who are fed up with "the establishment." The rest of humanity barely knows that "indies" exist in *any* industry. So touting yourself or anyone else as an indie isn't a meaningful marketing strategy if you want to make sales to non-indies.

The ASP is useful, I find, because of pooled knowledge, people learning from each other. That and the whole PAD thing. PAD rocks. But that's about it. The ASP is veterans teaching new meat how to survive, and it does that job admirably well. But I have *never*, in 6 years of selling The Journal *EVER* had a potential customer ask me if I was a member of the ASP. The software-buying public, in general, simply doesn't care. They buy The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/) or Artifact (http://www.samugames.com/artifact/) because they found it, tried it, and liked it. And they were able to find it because over the years I've learned how to promote my software, and I've augmented my own experience with that gleaned from ASP members and other indies I know. I'm still learning, for that matter. There's always room for getting better...

An indie game dev oriented organization would serve a similar purpose. It would help new indies avoid what's been done to death, and maybe teach them how to go from a great idea to a finished product. And it can show the indie how to promote and provide a collection of "best practices" about handling building a community of players and leveraging content upgrades and sequels.

But when it comes to promotion of individual games and collections, the organization cannot credibly get involved. it's up to the indie to do all that, to do what works for him or her. The indie finds his own publisher, promotes his own products, manages his own business.

I think we are all agreed that a website is definitely something indie games need. I think DIYGames.com is a good place to start.
Once one of these sites takes off, I will stop trying to create my own (www.positech.co.uk/indiegames) and ensure I give the new site my full support.
Apart from the general lack of content at the moment, I think the one bigt hing missing from diygames is good forums, you just HAVE to have good forums on any popular website these days.
Pretty much everyone uses phpbb.
Its free, and even I can set it up, so it must be easy ;)
It also needs some different size banners people can use to link to it.
There is never any shortage of discussion on this topic, but nothing ever gets done ;)

DIYGames does allow you to comment on the news posts if you're logged in.


Originally posted by DavidRM
But when it comes to promotion of individual games and collections, the organization cannot credibly get involved.

I think you’re exactly right about this David. I think there may be some ambiguity in this thread about what such a site would entail. One concept that is apparent is a site that collectively markets products developed by Indies. Personally I agree with David on this one, as this is not the best way to go about increasing awareness of “non retail” / “Indie” games.

The other idea is to have some sort of central information site that has news, unbiased reviews, avenues for consumer feedback, and community tools to support the community of people who buy and play Indie games as opposed to those who develop them.

I know as a kid I played shareware games almost exclusively. My parents wouldn’t buy me games and I couldn’t afford the big retail games. I guess I could have been referred to as a “Shareware Gamer.” It would be nice to have a site that catered to “Indie Gamers”. Admittedly this is a tricky thing to do because the spectrum of Indie Gamers is just as diverse as the spectrum of Indie games. But I believe there is value in finding a common ground and supporting the community of our current and potential customers.

"The indie finds his own publisher, promotes his own products, manages his own business"

I think your relying on your definition of indie too much. It kinda depends on what kind of 'indie' you want to be. Would you rather be the indie that you describe or would you rather be independant of outside interference in the games you make? To me being indie doesn't necessarily mean you have to promote your own products and manage everything about your business. To me it is more about making the games I want to make.

However, to do this we all need money. For many, its hard to sell enough copies to keep up with the bills. Even good games are often difficult to sell. And besides, I'd personally rather be making my next game then spending all my time trying to market my last one. So, I think banding indies together to share the marketing cost and work is perfect for what I want to do.

Dexterity capitalizes on this concept quite a bit. They do all the marketing for you and you sit back and reap a cut of the profits much larger then normally given to developers. This is great but your still getting only a cut of what you could be making if you could sell them yourself. A central web site could help more indies focus on what they like to do, make games, while still allowing them to sell enought to stay afloat. (and in the process educate more people about being indie)

One of the major problems I see in the indie area is that there is a huge gap between the "known" best practices and the common practice. It troubles me when I see some really talented developers make some basic mistakes ... mistakes I know are possibly costing the developer 90% of his/her potential sales. With just one day's work, many developers could permanently multiply their sales many times over ... if they knew what to do. But many developers still spend months working on the game, and just a few hours working on registration incentives.

An indie-specific trade association could help with this problem. The ASP is a great org for shareware in general. There are some problems specific to games, however, that other shareware developers don't have to deal with. Most games need art, music, and sound effects, for instance. And the ubiquitous 30-day trial is a lousy registration method for most games.

What DavidRM is basically saying about the ASP is that the ASP is not a brand. The ASP serves its members, but it means little to the public. It tried to do this at one time when BBSes and disk vendors were the main distribution outlets, but that approach didn't work in the long run. An indie trade org would have the same problems if it tried to establish itself as a brand to players. If the org tries to associate itself with quality games, then it has to keep out members whose games are of lesser quality; otherwise, the brand would be diluted. So there are some serious difficulties in establishing an indie trade org that tries to directly help its members market their games. The assistance would have to be more indirect. PAD is a good example -- the ASP helped make it easier to market shareware via PAD, but it doesn't do the work for you. And PAD/PADGen was originally developed by an individual (Harold Holmes) -- the ASP bought it from him.

Regarding a web site that allows posting of user comments, this is controversial. Many ASP members have complained heavily about the user comments on sites like download.com. Some developers are convinced their competitors are posting poor ratings. Others find people posting inaccurate reviews, claiming that certain features are missing. And still others question why posts like "This game sux" should be listed at all.

Ah Steve I feel so inadequate sometimes, with one post you can speak to the heart of some of issues I’ve been beating around the bush on for several posts.

I think we’ve established now that a central Indie marketing site is a venture fraught with peril. The problem is that the thing that sets a quality Indie game developer apart from a retail game developer is the fact that he is Independent. It seems natural then for them to say “look at the great ‘Indie’ games on this site. Come and experience the great games available from Indie developers.” Consumers come and sample the great “Indie” games and want more.

Two clicks into a web search they end up at “Bob’s Indie Games” (apologies if this is an actual company somewhere) Now Bob has seen all the great business the Indie guys have been building and he sees he can make some money off their credibility. So he whips together some crappy game in a weekend that only runs on his computer and start’s selling it on his “Indie” site. Your previous customer heads on over (and say for the sake of argument the demo works etc.) and buys Bob’s Indie Game. They end up having a horrible experience, the game barely run, some of the level’s aren’t solvable and it’s full of bugs. Next thing you know it they’re telling their friends “you never know what you’re going to get when you buy “Indie”.

Now can the nice guys who were marking good quality Indie games do anything about bob calling himself Indie and selling crap? Nope, Bob’s ever bit as Indie as they are.

The point here is that "Indie" is a type of developer, not a brand. Because everyone has a right to call himself or herself Indie there's no point trying to market Indie as a brand unless it includes the full spectrum of independent games, including the good and the bad.

(This would be chips in favor of making a news/info/review site for consumers so that they could be educated about the Indie market and never have to purchase a game from Bob the Indie)

In all honesty the Indie market isn’t synonymous with quality and trying to brand it as such is a folly. Indie games range greatly in quality and since being an Indie is as simple as calling yourself one there’s no one group that can bring all Indie games to a state where they could be branded and marketed.

I guess that would be chips in favor of having an Indie Trade organization that ascribed to certain best practices and whose members’ games were synonymous with quality.

Such a site’s primary audience would be Indie Game Developers however. Referring back to the original post in this thread, I still think there’s a need for sites like DIYGames where the primary audiences are people who are interested in learning about and buying Indie games. We as Indies benefit from supporting the audience of people that is composed of our customers. If we have sites that cater to that audience and support it with news and information we can maintain a larger market for our games.

There’s a fine line to be tread between supporting the community of people in our market and the developers who cater to it.

Things like user feedback must be implemented very tactfully so that such a site could maintain credibility as well as being fair to the developers. (as Steve points out some of the problems with free for all user reviews)

I think it’s evident that there are communities here that need support and I think there is a place both for sites that support and help the consumers in our market to make informed decisions as well as a sites that help the dissemination of best practices to Indie developers so that they can work towards producing quality games of consistently high quality.

I agree with dan that we should have a "Indie Trade organization" through which we can help each other by sharing the mistakes we made so that others don't repeat them. This could be something like the ASP for game developers. This would help the developers.
But it means nothing to the players. So i am still in favour of a site that has user reviews, links and news about indie games in addition to the trade org.


Regarding a web site that allows posting of user comments, this is controversial. Many ASP members have complained heavily about the user comments on sites like download.com.

I agree with steve on this. It could be misused. But i think we can have a solution for it.


Some developers are convinced their competitors are posting poor ratings.

This might be a problem, but we sure can restrict it. I am never for free-for-all user comments. I think we can restrict the reviews to registered(paid) users of the game alone. We can do this by the use of e-mail id of the player which he used to register/buy the game. when he posts reviews he should give the name and the e-mail id given during registration/buying.


Others find people posting inaccurate reviews, claiming that certain features are missing.

We can allow developer replies to the user comments. Of course, this would take time of the developer. But i think it would be helpful in the long run.

So i am in favour of two websites, one for the developer and the other to increase the exposure of the indie games through reviews, news and links to indie sites.

I asked a few of my friends what makes them download a s/w or game in download.com. One of the main factors is the user reviews. One of my friends was more specific. He said he would never download a s/w or game if it had less than 50% thumbs-up rating with number of votes more than 25. The other factor is the number of downloads for that s/w or game. This is by no means complete survey, but just an idea. Maybe we can have a poll on this.
Just my thoughts. :)

Originally posted by gana
I agree with dan that we should have a "Indie Trade organization" through which we can help each other by sharing the mistakes we made so that others don't repeat them. This could be something like the ASP for game developers. This would help the developers.

And how different is that from what we are already doing right here? The only difference I could see is that we could require payment, thus limiting the participants to those who can afford to pay. That has advantages and disadvantages.


I think we can restrict the reviews to registered(paid) users of the game alone.
Of course, now you are only allowing comments from those people who liked it enough to register it. It keeps the punks from bashing games they never even tried, and the competitors as well, but it does skew the results a bit in the positive direction.

I think maybe there is also some privacy problems there. If you tell your users you keep all info private, but then you share them with this centralized site, some people might not like that.

Originally posted by LordKronos
And how different is that from what we are already doing right here? The only difference I could see is that we could require payment, thus limiting the participants to those who can afford to pay. That has advantages and disadvantages.

I agree with you on this, but are we discussing EVERYTHING we do, here ? I have not seen many mistakes made by developers that are being shared here.


Of course, now you are only allowing comments from those people who liked it enough to register it. It keeps the punks from bashing games they never even tried, and the competitors as well, but it does skew the results a bit in the positive direction.

Thats why we have Demo versions. Anyone can download a demo and this kind of review helps them decide whether they go ahead with the purchase or not. This also helps people to try the demo if they see a good review. Thus it helps both ways. Also players can review whether they liked the full version or not. Maybe the demo was good and they made an impulse purchase and did not like the full version. They can also post reviews about the customer service which gives credibility to the developer.


I think maybe there is also some privacy problems there. If you tell your users you keep all info private, but then you share them with this centralized site, some people might not like that.


I never said that we should share the information. The developer can check with the name and email id and note in the developer comments that the person is not a registered user, if it is the case.
I am still in favour of two sites. :)

Originally posted by gana
I agree with you on this, but are we discussing EVERYTHING we do, here ? I have not seen many mistakes made by developers that are being shared here.
But there is nothing stopping you from starting a new thread if you want to discuss the topic. Also, stuff like this has been discussed in some of Steve's articles. On the other hand, if you want to keep a handy list of things like this, perhaps a FAQ in this forum would be helpful.

I guess the more I think about it, I could see the quantity of info gathered growing. It could possibly be expanded into something more along the lines of an introductory guide. The ASP already has something like this for shareware in general.


Thats why we have Demo versions. Anyone can download a demo and this kind of review helps them decide whether they go ahead with the purchase or not. This also helps people to try the demo if they see a good review. Thus it helps both ways. Also players can review whether they liked the full version or not. Maybe the demo was good and they made an impulse purchase and did not like the full version. They can also post reviews about the customer service which gives credibility to the developer.

In a way that is counter-intuitive. If I already downloaded the demo, I don't need someone to tell me what I thought of it...I've already figured that out myself. On the other hand, as you say it can help encourage people to download the demo, but again, the posts will already be skewed in the positive direction if only purchasers are allowed to post. The only case where I could see this being helpful is if the demo isn't really representative of the full version, or (as you said) if there is poor customer service.


I never said that we should share the information. The developer can check with the name and email id and note in the developer comments that the person is not a registered user, if it is the case.
OK, I guess I misunderstood you, because I thought you were saying that only people who purchased should be allowed to post. The thing I don't like is that even if I get a chance to state my case on the negative comments, the shadow of a doubt is probably already in the customer's mind and nothing I say can fix that.

In general, I apologize if it seems like I'm just shooting down ideas and not coming up with many of my own. I'm kinda busy right now and don't have a lot of time to put much thought into this. I'm just trying to quickly follow along with the discussion and offer comments here and there along the way.

But there is nothing stopping you from starting a new thread if you want to discuss the topic. Also, stuff like this has been discussed in some of Steve's articles. On the other hand, if you want to keep a handy list of things like this, perhaps a FAQ in this forum would be helpful.

I guess the more I think about it, I could see the quantity of info gathered growing. It could possibly be expanded into something more along the lines of an introductory guide. The ASP already has something like this for shareware in general.




I am with you on this.




In a way that is counter-intuitive. If I already downloaded the demo, I don't need someone to tell me what I thought of it...I've already figured that out myself.



this is helpful to people who find it hard to make a decision.



On the other hand, as you say it can help encourage people to download the demo, but again, the posts will already be skewed in the positive direction if only purchasers are allowed to post. The only case where I could see this being helpful is if the demo isn't really representative of the full version, or (as you said) if there is poor customer service.



But how can we be so sure that it will only be positive ? We may also get negative comments and other suggestions which will help us in general.
Any exposure we get is helpful, right? It also gives more credibility to the developers and increases the confidence of the customers.



The thing I don't like is that even if I get a chance to state my case on the negative comments, the shadow of a doubt is probably already in the customer's mind and nothing I say can fix that.



You have a point there. But i gave it as a suggestion to remedy the false claims of the players about missing features etc. This will help boost buyers confidence.



In general, I apologize if it seems like I'm just shooting down ideas and not coming up with many of my own. I'm kinda busy right now and don't have a lot of time to put much thought into this. I'm just trying to quickly follow along with the discussion and offer comments here and there along the way.


We are discussing something that will help us all. So someone has to point out the negative aspects also so that we may find a solution to it. Any help is always appreciated. :)

One of the challenges with creating a FAQ on shareware or on succeeding as an indie is that any specific information tends to go stale quickly. The ASP, for instance, fell years behind in keeping its web site up-to-date -- it was only last year that a new webmaster and a new content editor were brought on and much of the site updated. If you're an ASP member, you can see just how much shareware marketing has changed by reading some of the old ASPects issues from 5 or 10 years ago in the online ASPects archive. Registration sites and download sites come and go. Distribution methods that once relied heavily on BBSes and shareware disk vendors switched over to building popular web sites and submitting to shareware download sites. And once it was believed (sometimes religiously) that the best registration incentive was S=R (shareware version = registered version).

Today there are many new marketing models and platforms evolving: web games, wireless games, multiplayer games, etc. Try-before-you-buy marketing has evolved into something of a Hydra -- whenever one head gets cut off, two more grow in its place.

Our strategy has been to build a generalized system for effectively distributing and selling games online with a focus on long-term repeat business. This means we release a lot of games, and no single game is critical to our success. We also focus on measurement and optimization -- building an end-to-end sales system that becomes more effective over time.

But this is only one strategy among many. Another is to build up a single extremely popular product and market the heck out of it, updating it regularly. And yet another approach is to combine free web-based games with downloadable games, using the web games as teasers to attract customers (and possibly generating income from licensing). Still another strategy is to create a suite of popular games, such as card games, and then expand laterally (other platforms, other languages, etc).

And of course there are hybrids that combine elements of all these effective strategies. If you had the resources, you could create a suite of similar games, all with web-playable versions, for a half-dozen different platforms, in a half-dozen different languages.

So a challenge in creating a good FAQ on succeeding as an indie would be that for each question, you could have many possible answers.

You have to keep stuff in perspective.

I think the average Xbox game costs 3 million bucks plus a crew of 30 people to make (plus 2-3 years).

Now our little gems (games) are cooked up in a garage with some sort of outside income of cash to support you (don't laugh its cooler down in my garage upstairs is a oven at the moment).

So when a big review site gets a email from a indie saying hey look what I made with my one man team and a budget of $ 50 a week they probably don't care and delete your email. Oh but wait if I was at Microsoft with a beta of the next Halo they would be very quick to reply.

So we need a site were someone does "care" about indie developers I guess.

Even just a central website with everyone’s link ?

So you have your Link, maybe a logo picture, plus a discription of what games your indie company makes etc...
Also indie companies can be put into to categories like these companies focus on puzzle games, strategy, action etc...

Have a look at the music industry monoply.

http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/index.html

The same things we have covered here are the same for each industry pretty much.

Originally posted by LordKronos
Except that I'm not sure how likely that is to be helpful. If these people are warez fans, what are the chances they are actually going to buy indie games? Unless they card it of course (which is worse than "not-helpful", its actually harmful when the developer gets a chargeback).

I should have clarified my point a bit more, I apologize for that. I get a little wacky staying up all night :)

The idea is that it gets the name out there a log. Sure, a number of the people seeing the name are warez guys reading a forum, but there are a lot of people who enjoy casually reading those forums for kicks. It also improves your position in search engines from what I've noticed. As for the potential harm, I think it's relatively small. The people in most of those forums can get the game without having to commit a felony.

My whole point was the idea of name recognition.

Originally posted by cliffski
I think we are all agreed that a website is definitely something indie games need. I think DIYGames.com is a good place to start.
Once one of these sites takes off, I will stop trying to create my own (www.positech.co.uk/indiegames) and ensure I give the new site my full support.
Apart from the general lack of content at the moment, I think the one bigt hing missing from diygames is good forums, you just HAVE to have good forums on any popular website these days.
Pretty much everyone uses phpbb.
Its free, and even I can set it up, so it must be easy ;)
It also needs some different size banners people can use to link to it.

I liked your interview with Yamisoft, good stuff.

I agree with your thoughts on the forums. The commenting on messages is nice and all, but it needs to be streamlined significantly. I also think that the news commenting should be seperate from the forums section. PHPBB is a great software, and wouldn't mind switching to that. But there's almost nothing as sad as a dead forum, even if the website is decent.

Your mention of banners. Do you mean we should have more banners for people to use on their sites, or that we should provide more banner space? At the moment the only banner we have is your standard size that someone made for us. I even plunked down the $20 to put it up at Quarter To Three :)

Personally I think there are a few areas that we need to focus on.

Features: More. More. More! Currently we have a backlog of 5 features we can post at any time. And there are about 4 more in production, so I'm pretty happy with the way it's going so far. The idea is to post a new one every Sunday night. The difficult part is to make sure the feature topics deal with indie games and industry issues, without concentrating too much on one in the beginning. It's also difficult to avoid writing too many "how to get published" style articles that are mainly targeted at developers and not gamers. Gamedev, Gamasutra and a bunch of other sites already do this.

My current line of thinking is get to know the people in the world of indie gaming. Where are our John Carmacks, Tim Schaffers, and Tom Halls? All hardcore gamers know who the movers and shakers are in the industry. Gamers also deserve to know the names Derek Smart, Rich Carlson, Melv May and Lars Norpchen.

Reviews: Will start posting these this weekend. Obviously this will be a big part of the site. I've spent more money on indie games in the last month than I spent on "meainstream games" all summer, and I buy a lot of games. Finding other reviewers is also going to be a challenge. I've worked with a guy out of Canada in the past and he does a good job(he's a professional sports writer), but he doesn't have a keen interest in indie games. Don't want someone that's a militant indie gamer, but we also don't want people who will be comparing a game like 'Trash' to Warcraft 3.

Previews: I've always hated writing these. Every time I would have one assigned to me in the past I would cringe. Here's a secret. Most previews are based off of other websites and magazines previews as well as promotional handouts provided by the publisher. Maybe that's not a bad thing, but it's always made me feel uncomfortable. Indies seem equally reluctant to give you a beta copy of their game for preview purposed, and it's totally understandable. I'll either have to find developers more willing to work something out, or just sell my soul :)

Design: need to refine it more to give it a more professional look. This is a HUGE thing when getting people to look further into the site. If it looks like it was made by some 5 year old while napping then people won't have faith in it. The only thing that can negate this effect is a solid reputation built up over a long period of time.

Game Library: More library entries. More entries for completed games(as someone stated earlier) Not many people like to read about indie games that aren't released yet, there's tons of those.

Anyway, those are just some of the things I stay up til 3am working on only to wake up at 7am for work. Ugh.

A few things about the topics in this thread:

1) Does anybody actually go to the "gamer" websites? It's certainly not a place where I would expect my customers to go to, so getting on those sites is not an objective worth pursuing for developers like me.

2) A shareware organization for game developers is a good idea. There is an organization called IGDA, which I was a member of for a year but as far as I can determine they don't do anything, plus they seem to geared more to the commercial retail market than shareware.

The ASP has a mechanism for subgroups that has never actually been used. A subgroup of game developers could be set up using this process.

3) I don't know what the definition of an "indie developer" would be. There seems to be a desire for some kind of organization to guarantee a minimum of quality in its members products. The ASP used to go down that road, but ran into lots of problems. By necessity, if an organization has some kind of standard of quality it will mean that some (or many) developers would not meet that standard, which will anger them because those who don't meet standards are the people who most think that they do.

Nice to see you here, Thomas.

As for the gamer web sites, yes, many of them get extremely high traffic levels, especially those that update their content daily, such as Adrenaline Vault (http://www.avault.com). Whether or not their traffic is close enough to your audience to generate many sales for you... I'd doubt it. While some sites do cover non-mainstream games, you still usually need a game that has at least some appeal to hardcore gamers. Card games like solitaire would be a tough-sell to that audience, but challenging puzzle games have a shot, as do the more graphically gorgeous casual games.

I'm currently an IGDA member and even volunteered to help moderate their indie games forum, but it gets so little traffic (perhaps a few posts a month) that it's essentially dead. I would agree that the IGDA is focused on the traditional retail side of the industry and has little to offer indies.

Thought y'all might be interested to see that Voodoo Extreme posted a news bit about the BrixoutXP demo being released(great game by the way). The interesting part was the thread that started as a result of the post.

http://www.voodooextreme.com/Comments.aspx?ID=453&contenttype=1

It's too bad we couldn't create a print magazine for shareware/demo games, just like they have for consoles or commercial pc games.

Originally posted by Uhfgood
It's too bad we couldn't create a print magazine for shareware/demo games, just like they have for consoles or commercial pc games.
I'd have to agree on that one. I think there are much fewer game magazines compared to game sites and I much prefer reading PC Gamer, for instance, than browsing the net. I often print out web pages or documents so I can read them later on paper instead.

Each of us could help promote it by providing a link to the mag's site for interested players - after all, it's our magazine and it can only increase our sales. Sure, you could do the same with an independent gaming web site, but then you limit yourself to the same crowd who doesn't mind spending time online. Although I suppose we could offer both, in which case I'd still patiently wait for the print version to arrive in my mailbox. I find magazines more exciting and fun to flip through (or perhaps I'm finally too old to submit to web surfing - but consider our target audience). You can also easily come back to a past article or read it at your own pace - I hate searching through endless archives on the net just to dig up an old article, especially when I didn't get a chance to read its title, making it impossible to find!

To me, a mag would serve to assert the existence of independent games, expose the quality games, and attract fresh new rack stalkers at the corner store and introduce new people to independent games. Limiting its content scope is inevitable. For this industry to survive, it's important that we bring forth the quality games and interest players by proving to them that we're not just about puzzle games, let alone Tetris cloners.

I'd only have one request though; elimination of the term "indie". The word means nothing to the general gamer, and we certainly wouldn't want to further confuse them with developer categories. If anything, this thread has shown us that everyone here has a different definition of the term, and we're all apparently "indie" developers! Up until I got into this business, I always referred to our "indie" work as "shareware", despite the technical differences - Regardless, do we want to enforce our cryptic terminology onto gamers or use their language when communicating to them? The latter seems more logical to me, unless one aims to set themselves up for more work.

Babbling aside, I'd jump on the opportunity to do my part for such a print magazine. Unfortunately and as usual, the lack of money would likely be the limiting factor.

I agree there is a problem with multiple definitions of indie and joe public hasn't heard of any of them. The thing is, if we come up with any other name for ourselves nobody will have heard of us in the beginning. We would need a way to spread the word.

As for a print magazine. Making such a beast probably wouldn't be that expensive. It just takes work. I'm not sure how viable it would be, but getting it printed somewhere like here in New Zealand and shipping it over might be cheaper (all depends on shipping cost, big bundles of paper are actually quite heavy). If youe were to pay writers though, one US peanut equals 2 NZ peanuts. It's much easier to ship writing ;)

It wouldn't surprise me if the trickiest part was convincing places to stock the magazine, and from there convincing people to buy it. I don't you could make a go of it by giving the mag away. It would depend on what percentage of people try games based upon reading about them in the mag. I would guess a small number.

The other thing is, for it to have the most effect it should be a monthly. Do we have enough games for this? How many games are being released in a given period. We could go 'Look at all these games!' in the first issue then not have enough to sustain a decent mag beyond that.
It is also quite a time commitment to produce a monthly.

Considering all this I think mag would be great for the industry as a whole, but I think it would probably have to stand on it's own paying it's own staff if it were to be for any extended period.

I don't think a print magazine is vaguely viable. I assume it requires at least twice as much effort as getting a reasonmable website going, and despite many false starts over the years, we still don't have anything approaching a viable popular indie games website.
I think the secret is to start small, achieve what we can and move on from there, sure we would prefer a print magazine, ideally our own cable TV channel, but this isn't likely to happen, so lets concentrate on what difference we can make right here, right now.

Again I ask the question, is Diygames the site we should all be backing? are any of the rest of us in a position to put together a better site? Despite my earlier reservations, I do have faith in Steve Pavlina to at least get things achieved in terms of setting up a good, content rich website.
Remember, content is king. I read blues news every days because there is always something new to read. We need a website with that same kind of pull.
I'm prepared to do what I can to help, in terms of reviewing games, maybe articles, (any ideas?), but my web design and programming skills are limited at best.

In some ways a print magazine isn't as much work as a web site. When you print the magazine you know that it's going to look that way for everyone (colour blindness notwithstanding). There is no dynamic content, no browser peculiaritties and there is little chance of your paper crashing or someone finding a security hole in your ink.

As for wheter DIYGames is the site to support, At the moment, it looks like a good bet to me. Are the guys over there prepared to scale up if necessary?

I agree that a print magazine is not THE way to get the players' attention, but I believe it would be a great method to increase our audience. Not everyone relies on the Net for game news. Some consider any game worthy of mention in a magazine to be worth investigating. Perhaps it's not the most efficient way to start, but in my opinion, it's definitely a viable option for the future of any successful, longterm independent gaming marketing campaign.

DIYGames is one of very few sites I've encountered so far that's apparently dedicated to exposing indie-only games. I think that's exactly what we need in the way of online exposure. We've already got our indie geek talk forums sprinkled accross the net. I think what we lack is an independent games portal to prospective players. Half of them probably don't care who makes the games - they just want to be able to quickly download fun and good quality games. We just need to help them find what they want. We all know what the basic requirements are.

That was my plan with www.afterworkgames.com (http://www.afterworkgames.com). Unfortunately, I'm too busy to keep up with the daily game submissions for now. Putting myself in the player's shoes, I just want a single site where I can conveniently browse through game screenshots, medium-length descriptions, no popups or unbiased ratings, and downloads and purchases just *1* (one) click away. That same site has to filter the cloneware and shovelware for me so I don't have to waste time viewing or downloading unworthy games. It must NOT be some endless directory of unchecked games through which I have to sift, looking for the rare hidden gem.

Once people start enjoying our games, we can then remind them, "hey, you'll find more similar games by other independent authors!". The independent industry is always changing so we need to run that unlabelled pepsi vs. coke test repeatedly, because the quality of our drink keeps changing. I know Pepsi rules my taste buds so why would I even bother trying coke again (analogous to visiting an indie games site after obsessing over commercial games)? But in order to do that, I think money has to be spent on promotions through various media to grab people's attention. I feel like we're limited to the same crowd.

If accomplished through a web site, it needs to be promoted and stay focused on quality, downloadable, affordable, try-before-you-buy games and not obsess over the term "indie" or "shareware". Perhaps something more like "Games, by independent authors" and not the other way around.

DIYGames looks like a winner and will surely be receiving my support. The only suggestion I have is add a little more aesthetic liveliness to make it feel more like a site for game players. Right now it's hard to tell what the site is about without reading. I think it has to be more like a walk through Toys 'R Us where you know right away "ahhh.. I'm in toy land!"

Originally posted by Lerc
It wouldn't surprise me if the trickiest part was convincing places to stock the magazine, and from there convincing people to buy it. I don't you could make a go of it by giving the mag away. It would depend on what percentage of people try games based upon reading about them in the mag. I would guess a small number.

The other thing is, for it to have the most effect it should be a monthly. Do we have enough games for this? How many games are being released in a given period. We could go 'Look at all these games!' in the first issue then not have enough to sustain a decent mag beyond that.
It is also quite a time commitment to produce a monthly.

It's actually not too difficult to get places to stock your magazine. I used to help run a telecommunications 'zine a number of years back and finding places to carry it wasn't too difficult. Course, at a couple places we basically had to give them a dozen free issues for the first few months to show good faith. It also helped that we started with issue #3 and printed what were basically mock ups for issues #1 and 2. This showed them that we were at least somewhat dedicated and established.

As for there being enough games, there are definately enough games, no doubt in my mind about that. The most difficult part is finding out about them in the first place.

Originally posted by Lerc
As for wheter DIYGames is the site to support, At the moment, it looks like a good bet to me. Are the guys over there prepared to scale up if necessary?

Depends on what you mean by scaling up. If you mean paying for features($50), reviews($25 + free game), and previews ($25) then most definately yes. If you mean traveling to conventions to get stories (IGC, GDC, E3) then yes. If you mean end of year awards with awards engraved with the winners names then yes. We're in it for the long run. I realize the traffic won't came fast and furious at first, and I've dealt with this in the past. As time goes on and the content builds up we'll get more and more respect among developers, gamers, and the media. The important thing is to stick to our mission statement by maintaining our integrity and doing what's right.

It really depends on how one defines scaling up. Financially we're doing fine because between Cedric and myself we have a lot of resources to pool.

Originally posted by Scorpion
I agree that a print magazine is not THE way to get the players' attention, but I believe it would be a great method to increase our audience. Not everyone relies on the Net for game news. Some consider any game worthy of mention in a magazine to be worth investigating. Perhaps it's not the most efficient way to start, but in my opinion, it's definitely a viable option for the future of any successful, longterm independent gaming marketing campaign.

I agree. It may not be the most practical way, but you're going to reach a different audience by going print. Personally I would love to get back into doing magazine. There are a number of problems to work out (paper stock, cost of color, distribution etc), but it's worth it in my opinion. I would be more than willing to help out financially, and would submit articles and reviews. I'm game, no doubt.

Originally posted by Scorpion
DIYGames looks like a winner and will surely be receiving my support. The only suggestion I have is add a little more aesthetic liveliness to make it feel more like a site for game players. Right now it's hard to tell what the site is about without reading. I think it has to be more like a walk through Toys 'R Us where you know right away "ahhh.. I'm in toy land!"

You are 100% correct about that. Hell, if you had seen it a couple months ago you would have never come back :) The trick (in my non professional opinion) is to provide something similar to what you describe while maintaining some integrity. It doesn't help that very few people I know can even draw a stick figure. Since I first thought of the idea for DIYG at this past E3 I had no less than 7 people commit to doing the graphic design. All of those fell through over time. Finally we got Sparky to do a logo and a couple other things and we were finally decent. You're right though, still needs work.

I picked up the domain name "IndieGamer.com" & ".org" I realize there's some contention on weather the word "indie" is too general and not representative of our products, but the name just sounded cool. I don’t have any time to build or maintain a consumer site (and I’m not even sure it would be appropriate for me to do so) but I’d be happy to point the domain at DYI to get a few extra hits over there. ;)

>>As for wheter DIYGames is the site to support, At the moment, it looks like a good bet to me. Are the guys over there prepared to scale up if necessary?<<

I can comment on the technical aspect of the site. I coded the site and I usually work on commercial web sites with heavy database intecation and multi-level administration.
This site was designed first with administration in mind and to be able to handle anything.
Journalist can write their articles online, upload the pictures for their articles from their browser and lay it out. They can aslo postpone the articles and save drafts.
There are different level for administration, once journalists post an artile, it gets put in a queue for an editor to approve it. There can be many editors and journalist that can work in an efficient team.
The site can also easily be moved if our host cannot support the load anymore.
There is still work to do on the site, a few bugs to fix, and the graphics to be design. We concentrated our ork on the design.

I don't expect to ever make a dollar from this site and I think with Tele we are on the same page here. The purpose is to promote and make accessible good indie games to everyone, that's it.

Our biggest problem is that right now we are only two working on the site when it is built do handle a large staff (I code and he does everything else, noone for the graphics.)

What I want to say about diyg is that it has the potential, it is not limited by greed, glorifying oneself or by competence. Give it a try and you'll see, email tele (gregory) and he'll upgrade your account to journalist or editor, post some stuff, it is woth it if you believe in indie gaming.

Talk time is over.
We need some action.
I am setting up "Independent Game developers Australia".
Visit my site to see my progress.

http://www.nodnetwork.com/gpl/

I will be putting my full support behind the site and I will be responding to indie developer not suits with warcaft 44 and half.

I'm interested in indie developers in the New Zealand region.

Just interviewed Neil from Screaming Duck Software. :)
http://www.videogames.co.nz/showfeature.php?id=23

I could help you with that Wozza.

If your interested you could have a Php site like mine for New zealand ?

My friend made me mine.

Sidhe Interactive have allready done up a developers site for NZ

http://www.nzgda.com

I'm quite happy just doing the occasional indie update at VGNZ, don't really have enough time to commit to another website.

Thanks for the offer though. :)

No problem

Originally posted by Metatron
Talk time is over.
We need some action.
I am setting up "Independent Game developers Australia".


First of all, for what we have been discussing here, we need coordinated action and not everyone running off doing their own thing? We already have a situation where every other indie developer has their own game download site or online indie game magazine.

Second...Independent Game developers Australia? Your web site says IGDA for short? You do realize that acronym has already been used right?

Yer I know IDGA is taken but Independent game dev Australia is not ( I think).

If your unhappy with my efforts don't stress about it. Its just another indie news site.
When you have your orginized action give me a call. In the mean time I am going to get to work on a site for Aussies. Plus at the end of the day I am getting experience running a site like this which is good for me.

Its not that hard to set up a links page plus forums. I don't see what is the big fuss. Just make a hub/nexus site and we can start having people link up with indie developers. Thats what Avault IGN, gamespy do for nintendo, sega, EA, microsoft etc... They make sure that people know what they are making and selling. So maybe we need a indievault, a indieIgn, maybe a Indiespy.

I dont think that your efforts address the problem.

once you've constructed a media to advertise Indie
products, you are bound to review them no matter
how good they are.

at this point i see one of the following senarios come true (presuming that the media will become successful):

1. all products will be advertised. good products alongside
very low quality products. people who will enter the site/mag
will see features of low quality games and soon will leave the
site since thinking that all games in the site are low quality.

2. make selection of which games to cover, or give more/less
exposure to justify the reader's interest in the media. which
gives you the greater dillema of having to choose.

my point is that once you create the media that will publicize
shareware games, you cant ignore the low quality ones. and
if you do, youll have to define what are your standarts.

Good points. I will deal with the problems as they arrise in the new site. This could be a mr test run site. Got to get in the water to learn how to swim ( but drowning is not good :) ).

My solution

Continue to run the site for a year because I have nothing better to do and see what happens. Experience is worth its weight in gold.

Low quality games so what.
If people do not continue to come to my site then they probably were not interested in the first place about indie game making. The highs and the lows.

Do you go to the movies to sleep?
Do people comming to a indie news site about people who are unemployed trying to make a living while following there passion expect "Top of the line games" or "a certain must have level of graphics". Then if so, so be it. Most of the teams I know are one to six people strong and work off effort (maybe some coffee). Also they have day jobs, families, other stuff to do. Mr quailty games have 30 people 2 years and 3 Million.
Can people stop comparing our games to Halo. Its doesn't work.
We lack resources, man power and time.

Anyway a lot of good points have been brought up.
Keep up the great game making.

Do people stop playing chess because the chess pieces are not make of gold ? Not me I play chess because it is a "game". The level of detail on the chess pieces will only compliment the " game" not replace it.

The moral dilemma doesn't seem so compelling to me. Simply put, if you are interested in making some sort of website that gives 'fair' and 'equal' attention to all games, regardless of their inherent quality, then I think you've misconstrued the meaning of the words Fair and Equal. If you think that an "Indie Gamers Website" can be non-bias then you've overlooked the fact that it has a title that is inherently bias.

An indie gamer site would be a special interest group and would therefore be bias toward that special interest (in this case, small market budget games). This site would be making a consious choice as to what games fit that interest group and which games do not.

Also, indie-type gamers may like or actually prefer indie games for any number of reasons which aren't really on the 'measuring stick' that the current game industry uses to review games:

- Simpler gameplay
- not as fast paced / cluttered
- not as time-consuming (jumpinto-the-action gratification)
- cheap (budgetware)
- try-before-you-buy temptations
- original concepts
- runs on their 486/33

- Air

Why would low quality vs high quality be a problem?

If you look at most gaming mags, they try to review every
or nearly every game out for their particular system (of
course with alot of games out there they can't do EVERY
game). But if you look at the different e-zines or print mags
you see that they rate them, either high or low. That's
what the purpose of a mag (or a website) would be.

Now there is the thing, nobody wants a bad review, but if
you're going to be doing anything like that, you're going to
have to be somewhat objective. However to help that you
get reviewers who like the particular genre they're reviewing.

That way it's somewhat fair because the person that likes that
type of game will give it the benefit of the doubt, and so then
if the game is low quality and gets a low rating, you know it's
really a sincere rating since the person likes those types of
games.

Also inversely if you get someone that doesn't like rpg's to play
rpg's he's generally going to bring the whole genre down since
he doesn't like rpg's anyways. The only upside to that would be
if the person that doesn't like rpg's really likes the particular one he plays then you know it's truely a good game, since it managed
to hold the person's interest reguardless of what he typically likes.

And with something like that you may want reviewers to like
the type of game they're playing, and then get people who
don't like the genre to play it and give they're rating to help
the reviewer in their decision.

I agree with Lord Kronos that we need to stick together, and that all of us seem to already have our own downlaod sites.
In many ways that was the whole point of this thread.
I am still undecided on diygames, although I think it has great potential. I came accross a game there a few days ago ("It cam from hollywood") that sounds fantastic to me, and I haven't heard about this game anywhere else.
This is exactly the kind of thing I want from such a site.
I'm on the fence right now, but I'm first in the queue to add a diygames banner to my site (at least for the time being).

well i'm curious as to what people think
of what i've been doing with my
GarageDeveloper International (http://www.garagedeveloperinternational.com/) website
with regards to the demo CDRoms that i give away to people
that walk into my store.....my girlfriend suggested that
i start doing profiles/interviews on the developers
who've submitted games and post excerpts of the good ones
onto the website and make some sort of eMag
containing the complete developer profiles and include
them on the future cdroms.
she said she made this suggestion because she was curious
about the backgrounds of the developers who make these
games. i told her that i'd already thought of that myself because
i felt that this would further more awareness about us.
i also told her that doing a developer profile/interview on every
developer that submits a game would be impossible since
the number of games that are submitted are so high....
but i did come up with a slant on the idea though.....
because i have another site that's been dormant for
a while and would use it if i expanded on the theme. but i'll first
try it on the site mentioned above...

what do you think? do you think that this would be a cool
thing to include on the site/cdroms?
(ie: Developer Profiles/Interviews? etc...)
would any of you be interested?
i'm curious....since no one has ever mentioned
anything about what i do....but i do get the occasional
"what you do at your site is cool" email.

I would say why not just a do a few and see how they go ?
Do a few interviews and see if people are interested.

Like lotto you got to be in it to win it.

Originally posted by cliffski
I am still undecided on diygames, although I think it has great potential. I came accross a game there a few days ago ("It cam from hollywood") that sounds fantastic to me, and I haven't heard about this game anywhere else.
This is exactly the kind of thing I want from such a site.
I'm on the fence right now, but I'm first in the queue to add a diygames banner to my site (at least for the time being).

Same situation here (that looks like a sweet game), I found out about it because of DIY Games.

By the way! Has anyone here been to Madmonkey? Another indie gamers site, with news, reviews, etc. etc.

http://www.madmonkey.net/page.cgi/index

Mad monkey rules!

Thanks for the link. This is exactly what I am talking about.

http://www.madmonkey.net/page.cgi/about

Spot on here too. The monkey is going to get my support.