Homemade games at Grab

[Cuculain]

I noticed that Grab has published the beta version of their revamped site. I must say that I didn't much like the change from 'Indie' to 'Homemade'.

[Ricardo C]

Ugh. That's infuriating.

[Sirrus]

Ugh. That's infuriating.

I second that.

[Raptisoft]

Haha, can "Hobby Games" be far off?

[svero]

Well I would prefer just "games" -- From a customer perspective.. ie grab.com's customers, regular browsers who are not "in the know" the term "indie" doesn't really mean a whole lot. I see the change as an attempt to give the section a name that regular folks visiting the site can understand. That being said "homemade" is a terrible choice, as it kind of implies crappy.

[princec]

Definitely. Homemade is an excuse for crap graphics, crashing, bugs, and tediousness. Maybe that's why they put them all in that section?

Cas :)

[mahlzeit]

Or... the term "homemade" lowers customers's expectations and they don't mind the lower quality.

[Midnight Synergy]

I'm also getting spam of the "User PinkFrosting88 wants to be your Friend" kind from Grab.com - not too impressed.

[Jim Buck]

Don't forget that homemade cooking is the best kind of cooking! :) Perhaps the hope is that people may associate the word with that type of context.

[Ricardo C]

Yeah... I'm thinking no ;) "homemade" doesn't exactly fly when talking about technology. Care for a ride on my homemade car?

[Jim Buck]

How about flying on my homemade airplane? :)

[Greg Squire]

I find the change to "Homemade" a little bit insulting. It has some negative connotations that some people may find hard to shake.

I don't know if this is ploy to get developers to move to over to the published side of their site (where Grab makes money off your game)? Not sure.

[3dben]

As a name suggestion, how about "Micro Games" ? Its not offending to the developer and suggests something simple to the user, not necessarily production value wise, but something more along the lines of easy to get into.

-=ben

[Raptisoft]

So we're all agreed? No more licensing to Grab.com until they change it to "Awesomest Awesome Games For the Awesome New Milennium?"

[3dben]

I think you forgot at the end there " that are awesome!". :D

-=ben

[Ricardo C]

As a name suggestion, how about "Micro Games" ? Its not offending to the developer and suggests something simple to the user, not necessarily production value wise, but something more along the lines of easy to get into.

-=ben

How about "games"? :rolleyes:

[Sirrus]

Micro sounds like mini-games you play in a web browser...
I'd prefer Indie many times over Homemade.

[maksum]

Though I don't know, I'm "guessing" that this is the issue they were facing:

casual users think that we have a section of games from India... what word can we use instead?

I'm not entirely certain, but virtually everyone I've talked to that is not familiar with the "indie" scene, is not at all familiar with the term. Heck, I had been developing my own little games for a couple years, and even started to heavily look into making money off them before I learned the term. I was doing a search, and I kept wondering myself why "Indie" kept coming up in my results.

I have no doubt that the strong majority of their users do not know what the term "indie" means at first glance. I have a pretty good feel for their userbase too as I've been interacting with them since the original site was in Beta.

I also doubt that it's some agenda to get "indies" to sign on with them to sell their games. It's a very ad-driven business model they have going on with that site.

Finally, if there is a better term that is concise, has no negative conotations, and communicates to visitors that these games are "Independently Developed" I am sure they would be open to it. Malcolm visits this board at least occasionally, just let him know.

[Ricardo C]

Again, I ask, what's so terrible about simply calling them "games", instead of ghetto-izing them with an additional label that only the initiated will recognize? We don't have cooties, you know.

[KNau]

Agreed, the "indie" label probably does more harm than good. At the same time there should be some differentiation since those looking for Grand Theft Auto cheats aren't likely to care about the latest batch of levels for Supreme with Cheese.

[Ricardo C]

They might, if they were exposed to them. I'm as hardcore a gamer as can be, but I still fell in love with Zuma and Bejweled once I was made aware of them. They should divide the games by genre rather than by origin.

[Gmicek]

I'm wondering how many times we can get Ricardo to repeat himself. :p

As far as people not getting the indie lable, I dunno, it's not like the word Shareware, one that isn't really used in the real world. Indie is used in many areas of life. I can see the point of people possibly not caring though, but simply saying "games" is just a little too general. It's like saying "I LIKE MOVIES!" Ok, great, that tells us nothing. Besides, in just calling them games you're prompting comparisons to the big titles out there.

Calling them "Homemade" is just horrible bad in my opinion. Homemade has a strong "crap" connection to it. Besides, what about a company like Reflexive, their titles are homemade, they have an actual office.

Anyway, the idea of seperating indie vs non indie games on a site like grab is fairly pointless if you're not showcasing or spotlighting the indie games to some extent, since indie games can compete with the big boys in the types of titles grab has.

[3dben]

Were really talking about quality of games here. Simply put, don't host crap games. Create catagories like most portals that describe the games best, puzzle, arcade, etc.. and leave it at that. If a game sucks then it really doesnt belong anyhow, no need to single out games and put them in a catagory "crap games" (disclaimer: I have not looked at grab.com so if your game is in their indie section im not saying your game is crap.)

-=ben

[tc_bobo]

Yes, it did change from Indie to Homemade.

We thought long and hard about it the name change. There was lots of debate, yet in the end we made the decision to change it because we wanted to attract a larger amount of our users on Grab.com to the Homemade Games channel. We want to get more of our users to play your games.

The name change occured because the 30+ female casual gamer doesn't know what "indie" means, and data (focus groups/emails) have shown this.

Obviously, we knew that some in the "Indie" community would not like the name Homemade. We understand that, yet as mentioned above it comes down to one simple issue of getting more people to play your game.

We did some focus group testing and received positive feedback on the name Homemade, as users liked the added variety of games they found in the Homemade Games part of Grab.

Why not just GAMES? The whole model of the Grab.com Homemade Channel is to allow all developers to self-publish their games. Unfortunately, some games will not be well received by users for various reasons. To maintain a certain quality on Grab.com, we have to seperate the games. However, the whole goal for the Homemade game channel is to let the best Homemade Games bubble to the surface. Our users will find them, and we do spotlight the games that prove popular with our audience. You can even find a section about Homemade Games on the Games main page of the new Grab.com

There is a vision for the Homemade Games section and you'll see that play out quite a bit this year. We'd love to have all game developers become part of the community at Grab.com

If you have any questions, let me know.