Finding Indie Games

[GameStudioD]

There was another thread talking about portals. I am starting this one to rant about how difficult it is to find indie games. My pet peeve.

I like BigFish's site and how they limit each category to less than 20 games. Most of their games they feature exhibit polish. Although, they are strictly targeted to one group of gamer. What happens when that gamer gets bored of 'puzzle games'? I am personally bored of BigFish now, too many of the same games.

By far, the best places to find indie games is the warez sites. There are 2 systems warez sites have: either the author posts cracked games that he likes or a request system where gamers request games they want. The result is a very good collection of games to browse through. I hear about most indie games through warez sites now.

Although, warez sites are frequently poorly designed they are extremely user friendly. A trend I see in warez sites is tutorials on how to apply cracks and use keygens. I frequently purchase shareware games, and companies are seldom this friendly. I will get a confirmation email with a serial or dl link, and thats it. If I never went through this process before, I would be a little lost.

There are review sites out there: http://www.gametunnel.com and http://www.diygames.com . Is it just me, or are these sites horrible to navigate? I seldom go to these sites because it is difficult to find games or any information for that matter. If either of these sites were organized, it would give a portal a run for its money.

I think there is a better way to connect gamers with independent games. A middle ground between developer unfriendly portals and illegal warez sites has not been explored.

[gmcbay]

I love the smell of an impending flamewar in the morning.

[BantamCityGames]

(Formerly BrewKnowC on Dexterity Forums)

I agree that most indie game sites are pretty hard to find. Hell, you can't even find Bantam City Games site unless you type something to do with werlin. For the time being, I think Big Fish and similar sites are great. I made way more at Big Fish in a month than by direct sales in 8 months. But with the way things are heading, I have a feeling that eventually the royalty rates will continue to drop and drop until its basically the retail market all over again. Now if this happens, I predict smaller portals will start emerging with higher royalties again and the cycle will continue. What does this mean for us? I guess we'll have to wait and see and like svero said, just try and adapt with the times.

[Gmicek]

Although, warez sites are frequently poorly designed they are extremely user friendly. A trend I see in warez sites is tutorials on how to apply cracks and use keygens. I frequently purchase shareware games, and companies are seldom this friendly. I will get a confirmation email with a serial or dl link, and thats it. If I never went through this process before, I would be a little lost.

I'm all for dumbing down the registration process as much as possible, but I guess I don't understand getting lost doing it. Sure, crackpot developers (http://www.zero-sum.com/) that require you to send in a randomly generated key unique to their PC and get a registration key for the game in return are asking for all sorts of trouble (and low sales). If I get an email from someone I just purchased a game from I generally look at it, if the email states "Click here to download your game" I tend to take what they're saying at face value and download my game.

However. When it comes to seeing what has been released, you're right, warez sites (specifically release sites such as Izonews) are a good resource. That's because the entire point of the warez scene for the hardcore is to get as much as possible, regardless of quality or usefulness. Because the indie news sites have such limited resources (manpower more than anything else) they/we have to pick and choose what is featured. Even the big name sites such as Gamespot and IGN do this, not every game released is even mentioned by those sites, and they have large fulltime staffs that are paid for that kind of thing. The warez community is so large (in both manpower and financial power) that they don't face the problems a site run by a couple guys in their off hours.

There are review sites out there: http://www.gametunnel.com and http://www.diygames.com . Is it just me, or are these sites horrible to navigate? I seldom go to these sites because it is difficult to find games or any information for that matter. If either of these sites were organized, it would give a portal a run for its money.

No doubt, you're 100% right. The way GT, DIY, and Bytten are set up it makes finding information on specific titles a challenge (to be fair though, GT's review archive is organized better than the other two, if you can get past the wonky game classification). You're way off base in saying that any of us could give the portals a run for their money though. First of all, we're not here to sell games, we're here to create original content concerning the indie game world, much different than putting an info page up with a buy now link and a spiffy navigation system. Secondly, the portal sites have the money, time, and resources to devote to making the visitors experience as easy as possible. I know that with DIY at least we had to make the interface as painless as possible and go from there, because really we weren't sure where the focus was going to be. And check out search feature, it doesn't suck, man.

On a final note. I mentioned in another thread that we were in the middle of putting things together for our re-launch later this summer. Once it's finished you'll be able to go to the DIY Games library and search for games based off their genre, developer, platform, release status, or title. So, for example, if you liked Bricks of Egypt you could go to its entry and get what is essentially a little info page (resembling an affiliate sales page more than anything else) with links to reviews on either DIY Games, Game Tunnel. From this page you can click the 'buy now' button and purchase it through us, you can download the demo from the developer (or us depending on the game), click on the develops name and see a listing of other products they've released (or have in the works), and so on. When we had our library when DIY Games launched it was quite a headache to find anything usefull, and it was pretty bloated code wise, there were also only 50 games in there. Since I started gathering titles to be included last month we're up to just under 250 and hope to have 500 by the time we launch. And let me tell ya. Even though we're basically copy/pasting info from the developers own sell pages and only including two or three screenshots per page, it's taking a lot of time and effort to put it together.

[z3lda]

I too, intend to enter the indie game portal arena :p . I registered www.sharewaregamer.com back in June and plan to take full advantage of it.

I've read previous post on the topic and have taken some notes.
Sharewaregamer.com will have these main features:

-Indie game news (Submitted by people like you)
-Weekly/Monthly reviews (free, no cost to the developer)
-All games seperated by genre, and searchable
-Account setup to buy ad space using paypal with statistics
-Member account to add comments to reviews (Share DB with message board)
-Affiliation with Developers

Some of these features require the website to have some significant presence on the web in order to work :cool: . I plan to market the site mostly through google adword, and hopefully partner with existing sites to spread the word of independent games.

[svero]

I think part of the problem is that the sites that use to be good resources for the latest games (download sites like download.com) failed to be profitable. They didn't manage to find a good way to turn their business model into a model where they were making money. Strangely the Palm sites seem to have done a good job of this. I'm not a huge fan of Palmgear but it's strange to me that more PC sites haven't moved to a similar model.

In the end it's a bit of a catch-22 -- A site makes no money so it has nothing to invest in being a better site from the user's point of view. A site isn't useful so people don't surf there and therefor the site has nothing to leverage to make money.

Download.com could have done a good job with this because they had lots of traffic to leverage. They started trying to turn the site into something profitable by steering away from advertising and using other things like paid submissions. That could have been good had the money been used to enhance the browsers experience at the site. But instead browsing download.com for games is now worse than ever. Anyone who's ever browsed the what's new list there knows what I mean. It's no longer worth showing up to see what the new games are, and when I try to think of another site to check out what's new... my mind draws a blank. All I can think of is the major portals.

[Mike Boeh]

According to what download.com told me at the SIC, that's about to change, and they are going to start a system similar to affiliates/portals (they were a little vague).... Will be interesting to see how it turns out.

[GameStudioD]

I'm all for dumbing down the registration process as much as possible, but I guess I don't understand getting lost doing it.

Its not about getting lost in the reg process ... its about customer service. I have purchased about 10 indie games in the past 4-5 months. The confirmation email just gives a link or a serial and receipt information. This is direct communication with the customer and an opportunity to leave them with a positive feeling about your company (and more importantly indie games in general). The best way to do this would be to say here is your serial, these are the next steps to do next, thank you and we will see you again. I am quite surprised how many confirmation email leave out the words 'thank you'.

You're way off base in saying that any of us could give the portals a run for their money though

If you look at other businesses on the net, the sites that connect customers with products and businesses are more important than the businesses themselves. Epinions, zdnet, pricewatch, etc all offer customers a way to read reviews and compare prices of products. These sites are vital to online stores. The indie game industry lacks these places to go to connect with all the fragmented game developers out there.

These portals offer a narrow view of the shareware gaming world, as the portals get bigger that view will be even narrower. I believe a good review site can offer so much more than a portal ever could. It has the ability to connect customers with games, where a portal connects customers with their games. GamePro, EGM, gamespot.com are game review avenues that gamers have come to depend on for game buying suggestions. Gamers seem to go to reviews first before going to a store. Even though I think GameTunnel and DIYGames are not user friendly, they can be the GamePros or EGMs of the indie scene. Yes, this reputation and clout in the indie game industry must be earned with energy, hard work and time.

[Gmicek]

I am quite surprised how many confirmation email leave out the words 'thank you'.

Can't argue with you there. I remember one of the coolest things was buying the CD version of Hateful Chris and having it include a letter thanking me for my purchase and how they value my business, and it was actually signed. It helped make up for the fact that the game took 3+ weeks to get to me. Too bad it sucked :(

GamePro, EGM, gamespot.com are game review avenues that gamers have come to depend on for game buying suggestions. Gamers seem to go to reviews first before going to a store. Even though I think GameTunnel and DIYGames are not user friendly, they can be the GamePros or EGMs of the indie scene. Yes, this reputation and clout in the indie game industry must be earned with energy, hard work and time.

Oh god, I hope we don't ever become GamePro or EGM, hahaha. I'd like to become NextGeneration, a great magazine that seemed to be geared a bit too much towards developers that also had a horrible subscription rate (apparently). :)

[Wayward]

I can't accept the opinion that an indie portal couldn't compete with the big portals for reasons of money and resources. Then how do indie games compete with retail games? They don't compete directly. Instead they offer something different. Indies find a niche.

Who here can't see what's wrong with download.com for indies? There is a service needed by indies that isn't being provided by anyone. That's the very definition of a niche business.

My suggestion that indies should unite to create this service together was perhaps hopeful; I don't see that happening. Instead, it'll probably take a lone entrepreneur to fill this niche.

[svero]

>I can't accept the opinion that an indie portal couldn't compete with the big
>portals for reasons of money and resources.

Money and resources are what makes a big portal a big portal. Without that it's just another one of several hundred sites with no traffic. No matter how nice you make it you can't sell anything from it if you don't have the traffic. I guess it might be possible to build up the traffic with a really really well managed site, but who's going to finance getting all up to par, and who's going to pay to sustain it for the many years it would take to build that traffic up?

[cliffski]

This is a very interesting topic. The lack of a pro-indie portal that isnt purely puzzle games it what holds back a lot of peoples sales. I really don't think there is a need for mroe sites, just further development of the existing ones. I regularly check out diygames.com and gametunnel.com, and I have tried to be as supportive as possible of DiyGames. AFAIK, right now you can't buy stuff through DIY as an affiliate, hopefully when that happens, they will have enough cash coming in to go spending on google adwords etc to generate a bigger base of traffic.
I think indie games sites could do with having forums. forums keep a site fresh and alive. without them , any site can quickly seem a bit stale and dead.

[svero]

I'm not suggesting competing directly with the big portals. That's not the indie way. The way I see it, there are two sets of customers...

But what about all the affiliate sites that currently exist. Why don't they fill that need? It seems to me what you're really saying is that we need a site with a lot of traffic that's willing to focus on selling different kinds of games (even though that may not be the best way to make money) -- But then you come back to the initial problem which is that in order to have a lot of traffic you need money and resources. The problem doesnt seem to be that there's sites or not. The problem seems to be that there aren't any *successful* or well funded sites that sell less casual games and somehow exploit that niche.

[Wayward]

I guess what I'm thinking of is a super-affiliate. Not as overcrowded, overwhelming, and open to abuse as download.com, not as control-freak as real, not as casual as Yahoo! and MSN, but bigger and more official-looking than most affiliates.

Yes, traffic will take time to build, but surely it's easier to build traffic to a one-stop shop than countless little shops.

I'm not convincing anyone except myself.

[Jim Buck]

Not only all the above-mentioned points, but when people are looking for games, they are looking for games.. not "indie" games. They are looking for "card games" or "action games" or "puzzle games" etc. We are the only ones that brand ourselves as "indie".

[cyrus_zuo]

I think indie games sites could do with having forums. forums keep a site fresh and alive. without them , any site can quickly seem a bit stale and dead.

I have thought about forums several times. I believe that they are actually more trouble than they are worth. As most everyone knows I run another website that gets 5 to 6 times traffic as GT. However, the forum creates so much work and traffic (3-5 GB a day) while creating so little revenue that I've decided that forums are both money and resource drains. Now obviously there are some positives in creating a forum community, but my experience makes me believe that they aren't worth it in the long run.

I think the big limiting factor here is still the money involved. I certainly do my best, and so does Greg, but there are limits to what kind of time and energy we can put in. We have full-jobs too. Sites like Gamespot have big revenue streams and still have to have paid user areas to make ends make. I'm pretty sure I could put all my time into the site and earn maybe $15k on the website. Not nearly enough to survive, and much less than I earn currently. Not a direction that I would consider honestly, I'm happy providing what I can, but it is really all I can provide at the moment.

I think the greatest thing is that this discussion is even happening. Two years ago there wouldn't have been the slightest thought about it...because there weren't any sites out there like Greg and mine. We've come a long way in a relatively short period of time. And unlike Gamespot, we have to go out to most every indie ourselves and we aren't financed by big game companies.

I know its a point I've driven home many times, but just like no one understands how much work it takes to make a good game until they've done it, I don't think anyone realizes how much energy we've put into making GT and DIY as good as they are. Certainly I think both Greg and I and our helpful volunteer writters do everything we can to make the sites better. (I'm really excited about the DIY relaunch!!) I just hope everyone can enjoy and appreciate what GT and DIY are in addition to the continued suggestions of what they can be.

[Gmicek]

Yeah, what Russell he said!

Concerning forums. I've said this before, but it was on Dexterity so that doesnt count, and I'll say it again. I asked Kyle from Frictionless Insight about forums and he said "What if we threw a forum party, and no one came?" Meaning that, having active forums is a great thing, but having dead forums are worse than no forums at all.

The biggest thing to remember about forums is that most of the posting is generally done by a select number of people. So you can have a relatively small forum, but if you have a couple rabid posters it works nicely.

[papillon]

According to what download.com told me at the SIC, that's about to change, and they are going to start a system similar to affiliates/portals (they were a little vague).... Will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Is there any known timescale on changes?

I'm sick of getting screwed by them and their maps'n'mods, and if there's going to be change imminently would prefer not to waste my money on the old system if it's going to be immediately revamped and the submissions lost in the wastes. :)

[Air]

I don't see anyone referring to the original reference to warez sites (perhaps intentionally? maybe it's like being afraid to say the name "voldemort" or something).. so I shall dare to do so:

By far, the best places to find indie games is the warez sites. There are 2 systems warez sites have: either the author posts cracked games that he likes or a request system where gamers request games they want. The result is a very good collection of games to browse through. I hear about most indie games through warez sites now.This is wonderful analysis. Why does this work? Because it's inherently free of all bias and commercialisation. It is, in a sense, the antithesis of almost everything the successful indies on this site are trying to do: Sell Their Game.

... not make a great game, but to sell a pretty decent one.

Whenever the topic of indie game portals arise, the concepts thrown around inherently become littered with ways to try to convince people to buy a particular game. And because we all have a very profound sense of fairness (hence why we all work independently as we do), we don't want to just portal games we think deserve to be sold-- we want to portal all games. Warez sites almost no attempt to pitch a sale on a game (why would they?), and they generally limit their new/frequent game postings to the games people like to play and that have established a level of reputation/popularity. There are few litterings of screenshots, fancy categorizations of game types, or other such things commonly found on indie game portals. There-in lies the plesantry of using a warez site to find good games.

The other comments regarding warez site FAQs and such I think are moot (although I see that's the part everyone seems to be dwelling on.. heh). Why? Because you don't need to apply keygens to games you buy. I'm not sure anyone's had an issue figuring out how to key in a keycode that was on the CD or in an e-mail. And if they have, I'm not sure giving them a FAQ would help. You have to be able to read to benefit from a FAQ and if someone's unable to key in a serial then I think they're ability to read should also be in question at that point.

Forum support isn't really of value either, and you needn't even speculate on that one: Dexterity's forums were up for nearly 2 years and in that time just how many Dweep posts were there? From what I understand Dweep is awefully popular and has a rabid following of dedicated users. It has lots of user-made levels. It had an essentially dead forum. Speculative: If you have a game that's targeted toward the 14-20 age group (RPG or RTS), preferrably with online gameplay of some sort, then you'd probably be able to set up a forum and get the sort of activity that might enhance interest and sales in your game. Otherwise, use a FAQ or something.

Conclusion

Maybe there should be a portal that's just a big dry list of games. You can lay out the contents of the list like so:

My Cool Indie Game (Action) [Company A] [demo (1.5mb)] [Review!]
My Cool Indie Game Sequel (Action/Puzzle) [Studio B] [demo (850k)] [Review!]
SomeOther Game (Puzzle) [Developer C] [demo (3mb)] [Review!]
Yet Another Game (Isometric/Puzzle) [Publisher D] [demo (15mb)] [no review]

That's just a rough idea anyways. The demo link should either go directly to an installer download, or a mirrors page at worst. None of this "I want to link him to my purchase page" crap. Clicking the name of the game itself can take the user to the product webpage (which would have purchase info). The developer/studio/publisher part can link to the main website for whoever it is you preference interested/curious users go to. Having a "review" link is optional really, and it could link to a list of a handful of off-site reviews (prolly best), or go directly to some pre-destined review or whatever.

You could fancy it up if you want with a page that allows you to pick specific categories to list, if you really want to. Or a basic search tool. Also, a faeture for listing all new games released since the user's last visit would be keen. And that's about it. There's your all-encompasing master list of indie games, giving the end user full and complete control of how and what they browse, all the while being entirely unbias toward any game, genre, or company and entirely unlittered with potentially overwhelming amounts of salesmanship or commercialisation.

- Air

[svero]

I think the new indiegamer should serve as a decent place to seek out new releases once I have two minutes to get the pages up. Just too busy with other stuff.. but I'll get there soon.

[nquijano]

I think the new indiegamer should serve as a decent place to seek out new releases once I have two minutes to get the pages up. Just too busy with other stuff.. but I'll get there soon.

Tres, tres cool svero, thanks in advance :)