Recruiting Developers For Game Savant Launch

[Savant]

We're looking for developers who want to be involved in the launch of a new application that I'm developing called Game Savant (www.gamesavant.com ). We are shooting for a launch sometime in April, 2005. The application/web site will be 100% free to use - Game Savant will make its money from affiliate commissions.

Game Savant is an application that users will download and run either in their system tray or as a regular window. It will alert them to new games being released, special offers being presented by participating developers, and other game centric news.

Users will see a list of games within the Game Savant window and can choose to download the demo, buy the game, or send a rating/comment to the server for others to see (providing they create an account with Game Savant - accounts are free and are used only to track ratings/preferences for game recommendation purposes).

Game Savant will offer easy access to games (downloads, screenshots, offers), community based features (chat, forums, rating system), as well as many personal features like recommendations (the application will keep track of which games you've liked in the past and use that to recommend games for you to download).

As a developer signing up to take part in the Game Savant system, there are only a few requirements:

1. Games. You need to have games for us to offer to users.

2. Affiliation. Game Savant relies on affiliate commissions and will need to form a relationship with your company. All that means is that we will set up accounts with Plimus, RegNow, etc. and you agree to accept our offer to become an affiliate for you. Any sales that are generated through the Game Savant application will need to have our affiliate ID attached to them.

3. Buzz. Game Savant needs distribution to be a successful marketing tool for you guys. Offering downloads of it from your web sites, mentions in your newsletters (after launch, of course) and offers/sales geared specifically to Game Savant users will help us all in the end.

Why is this a good system for you developers? Several reasons:

1. Exposure. Anyone who downloads the Game Savant application will be ready to receive your marketing messages. New games, special offers/discounts, etc. This means that within the hour of your releasing your new game, every person who downloaded the client will receive a notification. The more downloads the client gets, the more exposure your games get.

2. Customers. Game Savant doesn't want your customer list. We will send people to your buy page at your web site. All we ask for is affiliate commissions in return.

3. No "What's New?" syndrome. While Game Savant will have a "What's New?" page, the ratings feature will ensure that quality games will stay on top (if users feel it belongs there). If users are digging your game, it will always live near the top of the game page.

4. Security. Game Savant will contain NO spyware or adware of any kind, nor will it piggy back with other applications. It is a completely clean, stand alone application that has one purpose - to make you money.

Any developers interested in more information about this program, feel free to contact us at devrel@gamesavant.com . Feel free to post questions in this thread as well!

Looking forward to working with you all!

[ggambett]

Hmmm. An indie RealArcade relying in comissions. Good idea!

[Sirrus]

Question is how do you plan on marketing the Game Savant?

I think it is definately a nice idea, but getting exposure for a RealArcade style system isn't that easy unless you have a huge marketing parent company.

Why use this over RealArcade? Obvious to us that it is more good independant games that don't reach other portals, but most consumers don't care who makes the games. Not sure people would want both...

It is a great idea though so hope this works out...

[Fantus]

Directly competing with RealArcade is quite the challenge. I'm also interested in how you are planning to atract users. Besides that it sounds cool.

[Jim Buck]

This reminds me of a comment I saw once about RealArcade - that all it is (Game Savant too) is a glorified browser. I did not see one feature up above that just couldn't be on a webpage. In fact, that's probably what it is - a webpage inside of a mini-browser app. The thing RealArcade does get you that's non-browsery is the download/install/play pages (but that could be done as an ActiveX control). I'd much prefer to just have a real website and use whatever browser I'd like.

[gmcbay]

I'm so sick of software that wants to install icons in my system tray and run constantly in the background. After somewhat recently putting an OS install and much of the software I use on to a then-new laptop my system tray was bursting with like 25 icons! Does Quicktime player really need its own icon in there? Jesus... Most of it is gone now thanks to registry edits and other tweaks, but .. ugh, just ugh.

Sorry, done with my rant.