Gametrove Updated

[Danimal]

For those who don't know what Gametrove is it's a game portal where developers can post their games and when they sale the developer gets all the profit. The site makes money from ads.

It's been a year since Gametrove went up and it was time for an update, a big one, most of the site has been rewritten.

Company pages
Before the site was basicly a list of games and a page for each game. Now each company and member also have their own pages. People can go to a company page and check out what other games they have. If they company has posted news then they read about what the company is up to. Each member also has their own page where they get recommendations based on games they've rated.

Blogs
The forum is gone. If you want to post news on the front page just write a blog and it will show up. You can also choose to have your blog post show up on your company's page. Companies can have more than one member and every member can have their blogs show up on the company page.

Tons of stats
Everything gets recorded and most of it can be seen by anyone. Every game has a graph showing views and downloads over time. Every company has one showing how all of their games are doing over time.

Spy page
So I can spy on you all >:)

Most of these features are for developers in hopes that people will contribute by posting their games, posting news and buying ads which will hopefully draw more players and buyers. Content is king right.

http://www.gametrove.net

[soniCron]

Great update! Congrats! :)

Have you considered integrating TIGRS (http://www.tigrs.org) with your site, similar to Pjio (http://www.pjio.com)? I've gotten a couple remarks from Pjio users that appreciate the rating system. Just a head's up! Great work! :)

[MrQ]

Looks great!

I'm not sure the graphs are working though, I didn't see any graph data on any of the games on the front page.

I still have Gametrove on my list of sites to publish too :)

[Sillysoft]

Cool updates.

FYI: Using a mac and firefox, if when I click Download for a game that has no mac version it gives me a blank page. Maybe you could even only show games with web or mac versions when a mac browser gets the games page?

[mot]

As a future improvement, would it be possible to link my existing blog's RSS to the blog on Gametrove? It could just fetch the entries and post them there or let me pick only some of them etc.

[RinkuHero]

This is a great idea for a site, and I hope it grows and succeeds, but one correction:

http://www.gametrove.net/imgs/logo.jpg

The capitalization is wrong there ("The" and "From" should not be capitalized), and makes the site look bad.

Here's an article on how to capitalize titles: http://www.writersblock.ca/tips/monthtip/tipmar98.htm

[jeb_]

Danimal: We at Oxeye really like your work on Gametrove, keep it up!

[gosub]

Nice looking site. Two comments. 1) Can you get the .COM domain name? 2) How about displaying 45 or 60 games per page by showing the thumbnails 3x or 4x across with the title below? It seems like you're wasting a lot of space with a comment which probably won't be read. Or you could reformat the text so it doesn't go across the screen.

-Jeremy

[RinkuHero]

I think the screenshots are already too tiny, personally. But I run in 1600x1200 resolution. I really think that anything under 2x is too small for a screenshot, you may as well not have one at all if you're going to do 3x or 4x as small.

[gosub]

I didn't mean that you should make the thumbnails smaller. If anything, they should be bigger. You could do that and have 3 of them across the screen to fit more games per page.

-Jeremy

[jeb_]

I noticed a bug in firefox (see attached image). The problem doesn't occur in IE, but firefox is a kind of big browser now (at least in Europe), so maybe you want to fix it.

[RinkuHero]

Then I agree with you.

Small screenshots is just a personal pet-peeve of mine. Similarly, I think Manifesto Games would be ultimate if it didn't have such tiny screenshots (and worse, make it so hard to make them bigger!).

I think we should all help GameTrove get more traffic. Its Alexa rank is pretty small, smaller than a lot of individual developer's websites. But that's probably a natural result of not taking any royalties (nothing to use for advertising the site itself). Still, imagine what this would do for the independent games industry if it were as popular a site as the big portals.

[RinkuHero]

I use Firefox and I didn't get that error, strange.

Another recommendation for your site: I think you should make clicking the game's title link to its "more info" page.

[GolfHacker]

I like the layout the way it is, personally. A thumbnail by itself doesn't tell me anything - I hate sites that do that because then I have to click on everything to figure out what it is. I like being able to see the thumbnail, the rating, the platforms it is available for, and a brief one sentence description of what the game is. That way, I only click on games I am interested in.

It might be nice, though, if users can configure the number of results to show per page. I've seen other sites do this, and it works well for those with high-speed connections.

[mrkwang]

I use Firefox, and I can't see PICTURE of FEATURED GAMEs. Tried with Internet Explorer once again, and I can see those pictures correctly.

Maybe your site is not compatible with Firefox yet.

[Frozen In Ice]

Nice looking site. Two comments. 1) Can you get the .COM domain name?
-Jeremy

Doubt it. It looks like a squatter has it and the registration doesn't expire till June 2008.

[Cartman]

I found an issue when I put in my company url. When I put the url in as www.piddlepup.com, it created a link that was something like www.gametrove.com/www.piddlepup.com which of course was a broken link.

I looked at other entries and found that they were putting the http:// in front of theirs and that fixed it. However I think it looks better on the front page if you don't have to put the Http:// in front.

Good job on the site BTW. It looks great.

[Danimal]

Thanks for the comments. Most of the bugs people reported are fixed.

mot: Nice idea, not right now but I'll put it on the list.

I tried to get the .com but yep some guy is squatting on it.

jeb_: I built the site while using firefox! Doesn't happen for me, I'll try to figure it out. Maybe you have an old version?

mrkwang: I had a problem before with the top ads not showing up because they linked to ad_click.php and people had ad blockers installed. Do you have any ad blocking scripts?

[spellcaster]

Great site!
Just a few comments: On the detail pages, in the "People Who Liked This Game Also Liked" section I had the current game listed as well. So, on the "Mr. Robot" page people who liked Mr Robot also liked Mr. Robot.

I'm using Firefox 2 and had not problems at all. I tried most pages both logged in and without being logged in - in both cases the pages were rendered nicely.

And I really like the page design. Great work!

[mrkwang]

mrkwang: I had a problem before with the top ads not showing up because they linked to ad_click.php and people had ad blockers installed. Do you have any ad blocking scripts?

My Firefox has ad blockers installed.

Anyway many Firefox users does it, so I think you'd better change the link 'ad_click.php'.