Game Tunnel 2004 Indie Game of the Year...finished...

[cyrus_zuo]

Thought I'd post it here first...mostly because it is easiest and Andy's posts make me laugh...our top 10 list for 2004 is done! Time to pretend I'm taking a break :)

http://www.gametunnel.com/html/section-viewarticle-74.html

[Dan MacDonald]

Wow, great stuff. Time to get reading!

[stay]

Wahoo!

That was a fun read. I had never heard of Anito before, somehow.

We're enormously proud of Outpost Kaloki's 4th place finish (http://www.gametunnel.com/html/sections-viewarticle74-page5.html). The 3 games above that are really great games and deserve their place.

-- stay

[arcadetown]

Very interesting set of picks and respectible. Just played Wik & the Fable of Souls a few days back for the first time and it is very deserving of the placement (with a tounge like that you'd think he'd get ALL the chicks). Never saw Outpost Kaloki before, looks great, going to have to check it out.

[svero]

It's interesting how people hadn't seen outpost kaloki and Anito. And that's people in the dev community. Just goes to show you how important getting the word out is, and how easy it is to slip through the cracks.

[Andy]

Russel,

You started that - not me.
You can sure post it where ever you like but I don't care at all. ;)
And again because I'm already 40 this year i love you anyway and wish you success.

Have a nice year! :D

[Gnatinator]

Outpost Kaloki is great. ;)

Great job to everyone at Game Tunnel!

[Gmicek]

site is down. bummer :(

[papillon]

That's what happens when you pimp your site on slashdot without bracing the server first. :)

[Gmicek]

it's funny, i just noticed that. people are very cranky there and really slamming GT, ohhh well.

It's awesome that he got on slashdot proper, and not just the games section, but that means we'll never get our GOTY linked there since they only do that like once a year, hehe.

[cyrus_zuo]

Grrr...what a friggen night...

I don't own my own server...couldn't possibly afford that on what GT brings in.

I'm working like mad scaling down to hopefully at least keep the article up (pulling all images, swaping things to other servers, etc...)...though why is starting to creep in based on the amount of negative press, still though my affiliate sales since it went to slashdot are going through the ceiling...so hopefully keeping it up is selling a few more games for ya'll...

I hoped that my stuff at slashdot would create a stir...upset people mean more visitors...but goodnight! I never expected this type of traffic...

We've been on slashdot 3 times before an only once did we even get 30,000 hits out of it...we're doing tons more than that at the moment...

[Gmicek]

I'm curious about something though. I was looking at your stats and while you are getting a load of traffic, it seems strange that it's brought the site down so hard. Do you think it's inefficient PHPNuke stuff, a less than robust hosting service, or a combination of both?

Lemme know if there's anything i can do to help out, hosting images for example.

best of luck to ya!

[Chris Evans]

Greg when are you doing your End of Year awards?

[cyrus_zuo]

:)

If you are looking the Extreme stats you are being mislead...I only use those to help give me a quick track to link ins without having to hit my webalizer. They are not even close to accurate, typically they grab one out of 10 visitors to the site accurately (first page is pretty good, second page is crap)

On the average day the site receives about 60,000 file requests...that of course includes every file, each picture and what not...

Today we are over 350,000, which would mean about 6 times our normal traffic. Except that I striped all the files out, so anyone viewing the article in the last hour plus is only getting text...typically the file includes 30+ images, much more when you include our frame and ads...closer to 50. So each request is usually around 50 per page depending on cacheing by the browser and what not...over the last hour that means we are getting between 30-50 more people on per request than usual...and the numbers are still going up...I just Iframed the article and put it on my bros site (on selected hosting)...I should be able to handle around 200,000 more hits tonight...after that my host will shut me down again...hopefully not forever, but we'll have to see what happens...currently things aren't looking so good, but definately got a lot of discussion going :)

[Gmicek]

Mid to late January.

Suggestions are certainly welcome.

The plan right now is to have the following categories:

best graphics
best sound
best shooter
best arcade
best action
best turn based/rts strategy
best puzzle
best online game

special achievement awards

biggest rip-off
conspicuously absent
indie friendly media
publisher of the year
studio of the year
scariest trend
best trend

There's no adventure category because Jozef will be doing an Independent Adventuring games of the year special with stuff like best sound, graphics, story, and so on. Our ultimate goal would be to have an "expert" in the major categories and have that person do their own GOTY stuff every year.

P.S.: Prince, Troy finished the Super Dudester review, look for it Sunday or so.

[Gmicek]

If you are looking the Extreme stats you are being mislead...I only use those to help give me a quick track to link ins without having to hit my webalizer. They are not even close to accurate, typically they grab one out of 10 visitors to the site accurately (first page is pretty good, second page is crap)

Ohhh, ok, right on. That explains some other questions I had actually, hehe.

the last hour plus is only getting text...typically the file includes 30+ images, much more when you include our frame and ads...closer to 50. So each request is usually around 50 per page depending on cacheing by the browser and what not...over the last hour that means we are getting between 30-50

So, goal for 2005 is to make the site more efficient on the bandwidth and file front, hehe.

[cyrus_zuo]

:)

So some of the aftermath...

I put up everything in iframes with the actual content being hosted at selected hosting and took down the selected hosting server in under an hour. (I was getting my 5 hours of sleep at the time)

I flipped on the site first thing this morning and went to text only on my server. I did 2MB/minute with ONLY text for 11 hours (not an image at all...absolutely amazing).

During that time I was bailed out by Raptisoft who hosted the hamsterball demo for me (it was on a different server [my fish site] at the time doing 500+MB / hour all by its lonesome).

Mike Boeh also helped me out in a big way with some space on one of his servers.

I've added the images back to the article (they are being pulled from Mike's server) and tried going putting the full site into action once (I did 50MB in 10 minutes and then pulled the plug).

Overall a lot of noise has been created by the article, which I think is really a good thing. Thus far I've seen over 60 affiliate sales of the games in the top 10 today (I have affiliate programs for about 1/2 of the games). That is about 150x the number of affiliate sales I see on a normal day. My guess is the residual sales over the next few days will have turned this into a real good thing for all the indies that were included in the top 10 and to a lesser degree any who were in any of the articles.

I've taken a little flak, but overall, I'm real pleased with the results and the number of people who checked out indie games that many of the people apparently had never heard of. Sounds like there is still plenty of room for better marketing of less casual indie games.

[arcadetown]

Be careful or you'll be chewing up bandwidth at our rate pretty soon :D

EDIT: btw - I'd highly suggest getting dedicated hosting. Don't look at it as what the site can afford, look at it as the potential you lose. A few years back ran the site on upgraded home dsl then moved to some cheapo dedicated hoster and had more problems. At the time didn't think much of it as thought users will see past the problems but now I see that year had held our growth rate back causing far more loss down the road than saved by being cheap.

[cyrus_zuo]

A good thought...I certainly hadn't expected to go from doing 1GB a day to 5GB+/hour. Even 36 hours later when I turn on the site we easily hit 600-700 MB / hour. (my hosting plan was for 5GB / day, we'd never ever come close to that before, the high was right around 1GB)

[arcadetown]

Learned same lesson again just a few months back. Was on 2 server setup with 2000gb each and little margin. A big site had a bad sporadic habit of linking only the huge games here causing huge spikes. Had to block certain referrals from them instead of enjoying the extra exposure. Now on clustered 3 server setup with more transfer each. Just in time to handle the 6000gb last month (yikes!).

[Diodor Bitan]

Excerpt from a post by arcadetown
6000gb

Wow! :) I'm curious, what is the top bandwidth eater? (I'm guessing big demos?)

[stay]

Wow. This has been an interesting story so far. Here's another angle...

Over the weekend I was idly checking the traffic on ninjabee.com (http://www.ninjabee.com) and discovered that we were about 20x our normal traffic. I checked out the referrers and saw gametunnel way up on the list, so I went to gametunnel and noticed the message about heavy traffic.

So, yeah, this gametunnel traffic had a HUGE impact on the traffic of our little site. Since we get only a very small trickle normally, this was extremely noticeable and welcome.

I forgot about it for a while and then I came in to work this morning and found out we sold copies of the game (on our own site) at about 40 times our normal rate over the weekend. Yeesh!

Needless to say, our very modest investment in advertising on gametunnel (paying for a review/ad/links) was many times over worth it. Otherwise, our links would have gone to another site, and we'd only be getting a small percentage of those sales.

I have to strongly recommend GameTunnel advertising to any of you looking for more exposure. It was already worth it even before these GOTY articles went up. I feel like I should be holding up a Big Box o' GameTunnel and smiling toothily into the camera. "Thanks, GameTunnel!" :)

-- stay

[Coyote]

Well, I'm pretty thrilled with the GotY awards from Game Tunnel this year... and not just because we won the Multiplayer Game of the Year award :)

It seems like the quality of the top indie games has REALLY improved since I first started investigating it just 18 months ago. There's just a TON of indie games coming out now - it's incredible that Game Tunnel can manage to keep pace with even the the top handful and help sort through them all.

Here's hoping that getting slashdotted is an indication of the growth of Game Tunnel and indie games in general.

[Hamumu]

It really shows what exposure means though. I mean... a simple story on /. means 40x the sales (for someone who is advertised on the site that got the story, not even the site itself)? Can you imagine a one-page ad in the New York Times? Sure, the market isn't as geeky, but it's ginormous. It makes me wonder if it'd be worth it to stake the house equity on a TV ad during primetime or something. Okay, I can't afford primetime. Maybe during a soap. Get those soccer moms.

[Bluecat]

It makes me wonder if it'd be worth it to stake the house equity on a TV ad during primetime or something. Okay, I can't afford primetime. Maybe during a soap. Get those soccer moms.

I see heaps of those money maker websites and diet pill advertisements on cable all the time. There's even a virus and worm checking product being advertised. They must have some success with those or they wouldn't keep advertising them.

G4TechTV seems to have most of them. They are predominately focussed on gaming so maybe advertising on them may be worth looking into. I have no idea how much it costs though.

Here's an idea. A few of you with existing games, get together and create a website that has your games on it. A partnership if you will. You all then contribute equally to finance a series of ads on G4TTV or similar. Sit back and wait for the sales to come rolling in. ;) Any profits are then shared equally among the partnership, or shared proportionally according to the amount of advertising financing each member has contributed.

[NuriumGames]

BreakQuest was #5 and must say that this Gametunnel/Slashdot thing has been quite impressive here. This weekend bandwith/sales were like 10x :eek: the previous one.

Thanks Russell

[GBGames]

I see heaps of those money maker websites and diet pill advertisements on cable all the time. There's even a virus and worm checking product being advertised. They must have some success with those or they wouldn't keep advertising them.


Um, or they are advertising because they've been told that advertising works.


G4TechTV seems to have most of them. They are predominately focussed on gaming so maybe advertising on them may be worth looking into. I have no idea how much it costs though.


But you won't necessarily see such ads on CNN or ESPN. G4TechTV has an audience of gamers/computer enthusiasts. I think sending a press release to some of the shows on that network might do wonders. Advertising might help too, but you'll probably get more mileage if you can get them to discuss your product as part of the show itself.

[Bluecat]

Um, or they are advertising because they've been told that advertising works.

That might be the case if they were one off ads, but I see the same advertisements run over multiple months. I'd expect that if these companies weren't seeing positive results, the ads wouldn't stay on the air for all that long.


But you won't necessarily see such ads on CNN or ESPN. G4TechTV has an audience of gamers/computer enthusiasts. I think sending a press release to some of the shows on that network might do wonders. Advertising might help too, but you'll probably get more mileage if you can get them to discuss your product as part of the show itself.

Maybe, but G4TTV seems to concentrate on AAA titles, so unless the game is of that quality they probably wouldn't look at it. And if they did, it could be counter-productive. A low budget indie title may be soundly derided, even if it was an excellent game, since some of the hosts seem to be preoccupied with the superficial aspects of gaming. Advertising could get people to your site without the risk of a bad review.

Oh, and another thought. G4TTV would probably be far cheaper to advertise on than a mainstream channel like ESPN or CNN. Though if you had a unique sports game, ESPN might be well worth looking into.

[cyrus_zuo]

Glad to hear about the carry over to the sites...I had been in touch with a few of the developers that had their games in the top 10 and it seems to have been a huge success for everyone. I agree that more than anything it shows how untapped the market is. Actually this weekend (which was a nightmare for me by the way I did about 30 hours of work on the site between Thursday and Saturday night) has me really rethinking the future of the site.

I was greatly considering scaling back the site as other sites, all the many portals, had really left me feeling like Game Tunnel was no longer needed in the indie world, but after watching those affiliate sale emails come in about every 10 minutes on Saturday I realized that there are a LOT of people out there who still are completely unaware of the less casual side of casual games.

So we'll take that affiliate money and reinvest it into the site and see if we can't make this thing bigger ;)

[GBGames]

Congratulations on the big impact your site is having! B-)

[Chris Evans]

SlashDot seems to be mostly nerdy hardcore gamers, the very group of people we usually think won't buy a game unless it has a million dollar budget, let alone our little Indie games. So it's nice to see that myth put to rest with the events of this past weekend..

Obviously, there are still a lot of hardcore gamers who scoff at Indie games, but the GameTunnel article shows that there is indeed an unknown amount of people, which is sizable that will buy Indie games. It definitely seems like an exposure problem.

It seems an Indie game that gets some positive press and gets in front of enough eyeballs can do very well.

Russ it might be worth it for you to advertise on sites like Slashdot. You may not see the same kind of returns you got this past weekend, but it could help buildup the exposure for your site steadily with people who spend ample amounts of money on games.

[GBGames]

Russ it might be worth it for you to advertise on sites like Slashdot. You may not see the same kind of returns you got this past weekend, but it could help buildup the exposure for your site steadily with people who spend ample amounts of money on games.

Just, you know, make sure your bandwidth can take a mini-slashdotting all the time. B-)

[tentons]

It definitely seems like an exposure problem.
It seems to me that doing whatever we can to help the indie gaming news sites get traffic is good for us all. Imagine if Game Tunnel, et al. had traffic like slashdot or Blues News or Gamespot. That would go a long way toward helping the exposure problem.

[cyrus_zuo]

Definitely agree...

The site is being moved over as we speak to a dedicated server, perhaps if it can be afforded, advertising is something that I'll look at in the future. Certainly being on slashdot was a big help, though it was the 4th time the site has been listed there and we did more than 50x the traffic we have ever done from there before and that is really saying something.

[whisperstorm]

I'm actually trying to push the editors here at 1up.com to start giving more time/news/reviews to indie games. I'm hoping to start doing more reviews myself. Folks talk about how games are becomming stagnant, with only huge blockbuster games making any money or getting attention - I think the opposite will start to be true - small teams creating great games will begin to start getting the attention and recognition they deserve. Great article GameTunnel!

[Gmicek]

In my experience talking to sites/mags the most important thing is to underplay the puzzle element and talk about hardcore games, since that's their audience. For example, when suggesting indie games to someone an outlet I'll mention things that appeal to hardcore gamers like Gish, TCFH, Star Chamber, and Alien Shooter. Once you've got it in their mind that indie games aren't just Bejeweled clones you can start to sneak in other titles.

[Anthony Flack]

My site hits have shot up over the last week too, and I even made a few sales. I can only assume that this is due to my tentative connection to GT, via a review.

Just goes to show, all this community stuff can really work, eh? Well done GT! (er, now that you're all popular, perhaps some better spellchecking is in order, though? Just being picky...)

[cyrus_zuo]

perhaps some better spellchecking is in order, though? Just being picky...)

Totally agree...unfortunately, I am spending more and more time answering emails the last few days...I think unless the site earns enough to be a full time gig (currently it doesn't earn anything beyond getting me to conferences, paying for reviews and trying to save for that backend reworking) the grammar/spelling will stay pretty much the same...

...it just isn't something that I have to always catch. Time is something that cannot be created, but obviously if I wasn't working a full-time job I would have more to be dedicated, as it is, I'm dedicating more than I have :( and I feel bad about the quality not being where it should be.

[Gmicek]

I'm as bad as anyone with the whole spelling thing, it's quite horrible actually. I know we have at least as many spelling errors on DIY than there are on GT, but I've come up with a trick to reduce them. I'll post something but hold off on having it show up on the main page until the next day after I've had a full nights sleep. It's amazing how much you notice when you come back to something.