Indie portal

[Graeme]

Lately I've been toying with the idea of making a site with a database of independently developed games similar to a portal, but different .

There would be a top ten list or whatever, as well as maybe a "10 newest" or random game list on the home page, like a portal, but rather than allowing you to download the game straight off the site and taking a good chunk of the profits, it would just link to the game's web site, allowing for purchase directly from the developer.

So here's where I'd like some input:

1) Has this already been done a billion times? I seem to remember seeing a post by someone on these boards saying it would be interesting to do something like this.

and

2) If I did go ahead with it, I was thinking I could boost the site's content rather quickly if I just manually went around and added people's games, rather than asking permission, or having them choose to add the game. Since all I'm really doing in the end is linking to their site, and potentially helping them make money, there's no reason I should have to ask permission, right? I mean, it's no different from google linking to someone's site without asking.

I'm currently pausing the development of my game waiting for an update to the engine I'm using and I need something to do, so now seems like a good time to go ahead with it unless you all can convince me that it's pointless.

Edit: Typo. I hate typos.

[James C. Smith]

It has only been suggested billion times. I don't think anyone ever actually did anything.

[arcadetown]

Yup, everyone loves to talk about how great an idea it is but nobody wants to step up to the plate. Major sticking point seems to be many are just too busy and what $$ incentive does anyone have to do it.

I've been thinking about doing it on the HeavyGames model where don't mind giving out traffic as long as the partners also give back. Sticking point seems most don't think it should be an affiliated site as then it feels like just those other 10,000 affiliate marketing sites plus many (crazy?) devs think anything over 10 - 20% affiliate cut for it is too much. But w/o some real $$ incentive for someone to do it, this will probably remain just another great idea that never flys.

[baegsi]

1) It's important to take the customer's/player's point of view here: what would make your site attractive enough that I should visit it at all? There're already a billion games affiliate/wiki's/review sites available. In what ways you link to the game is completly uninteresting for me. So in the end you have to spent quite a lot of time to market your site and if you're not ready for that I'd rather spent my time learning something else.

2) Sure you can do this. You can link to whatever you want to (except that linking to an illegal site can make you responsible too)

[Chris Evans]

I thnk there should be a rule that you can't propose an Indie Portal unless you have a working prototype....

...yes, as James said it's been suggested a billion times on this forum. In fact someone already proposed one just 8 hours before you ( http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=6483 ).

Pretty sure almost everyone here (including me) has flirted with the idea of creating an Indie portal/network. The problem is for it to be worthwhile and successful, someone has to put a lot of time, energy, and money into it with the hope of some financial incentive. It can't really just be a hobby or side project, especially if it's going to be any different from all the other thousand of download sites out there.

Don't under-estimate the work that Real, BigFish, and the other portals do. Developer royalty percentages are low but it's partly because these portals are spending big bucks to drive traffic to their sites. As I mentioned in another thread, the portals pay up to .50 cents per click on keyword searches and advertise on networks that have $5,000 minimums, month after month. If you want your Indie Portal to have a visibilty that's anything close to the major portals, then you have to be willing to invest similar amounts in advertising and promotion on a consistent basis. But if you're giving devs 80-90% royalty rates on this Indie Utopian portal, then you're not going to be able to afford to promote the site on that same level.

Yes, royalty rates are going down and it's getting more competitive to get on the portals, but in my opinion the answer isn't creating (or fantasizing about) an Indie Portal. If you're worried just don't make portals the focal point of your business and instead use them (or any other distribution channels) when it makes sense.

[svero]

Originally Posted by Chris Evans

I thnk there should be a rule that you can't propose an Indie Portal unless you have a working prototype....

LOL :-) ...

...

[Christian]

I also have been thinking on this, and what are the money insentives? more traffic for everyone!, but i dont think that the portal type of site is convenient, because this makes only a few games selectable. Portals label only 10 games as beign good, and the others that arent in the top 10 arent good, thats why that methos is not usefull for us.
The method i think its better for us is some kind of search engine or questionaire, make the customer some questions of what is she/he looking for and then show games that matches that.
Questions would be like:
- Do you want a fast paced game?
- Do you want a game that has a story?
- Do you want a game that requires much skill in the use of the mouse and/or keyboard?

And so on, that way the customer will want something specific that matches his/her tastes, here the customer is the ultimate judge and not the portal.

Im definetelly going to do this in the future if no one does it before me... maybe in a couple of years ill do my first try, but anyone can take on my idea if he wills.

[Mr.Blaub]

That sounds like an interesting way of doing things. You could throw in a "10 random games" list which picks 10 games from the database, perhaps once a day/week/hour, and displays them on the main page.

[Sirrus]

Originally Posted by Christian

The method i think its better for us is some kind of search engine or questionaire, make the customer some questions of what is she/he looking for and then show games that matches that.
Questions would be like:
- Do you want a fast paced game?
- Do you want a game that has a story?
- Do you want a game that requires much skill in the use of the mouse and/or keyboard?

Didn't Savant's portal do this?

[GBGames]

Hey, I know! What if someone actually creates an indie portal? That way, people will presumably stop posting about making one since it already exists? </sarcasm>

B-)

[Savant]

Didn't Savant's portal do this?

It was along those lines, yeah. No developers were interested in helping or promoting or doing, well, anything with me on the site so it wasn't worth it in the end. I don't think anyone really WANTS an indie portal, they just like the way it sounds when they post about it.

[princec]

I've got a great indie portal which I've already made, it's called Puppygames, and it features cool games available on multiple platforms (mostly )... etc etc etc

Cas

[Artinum]

A friend of mine once pointed me to a website that sells indie music (http://magnatune.com) and queried whether we could run a viable business in the same manner, but for computer games.

Sadly "Magnagame" (as the working title was called) never really took off, but if anyone here DOES get an indie portal going, this might be a viable business model for it.

[arcadetown]

I'll bite. How does this sound? Our HG engine can basically handle this.

- Site along the lines of our sister HeavyGames
- Mentality is spread the wealth. Users get quick access to a lot of categorized games. No top 10 only bs.
- Members can submit new games.
- Members must link to the site from their home page.
- Members must provide affiliate enabled builds with atleast 35% payout.
- Exposure will be based on a loose combination of user popularity and those members that send more referrals.
- No drowning out the new games area with new versions or patch releases.
- No spyware, adware, etc.
- Site will have advertising to help pay for it.
- Members must believe in Karma, what they give, they will get back 3 fold. If you're afraid to help promote the site from your site, it's not for you.

[soniCron]

Originally Posted by arcadetown

I'll bite. How does this sound?

I'd contribute...

[Ricardo C]

Sounds good to me...

[GameStudioD]

arcadetown's idea sounds like every other affiliate based site... But, how would it be different from every other affiliate site? Couldn't we call http://www.terragame.com an indie portal?

I am not trying to be negative here, but the whole "Indie Portal" thing might be a bunch of hot air. A game site takes a lot of work, so you must have an affiliate system. Then, you only want good converting games... and, well, you are just like all the other game sites.

[arcadetown]

Originally Posted by GameStudioD

arcadetown's idea sounds like every other affiliate based site... But, how would it be different from every other affiliate site? Couldn't we call http://www.terragame.com an indie portal?

Somewhat different. It would actually land users on your game's description page on your site. For instance retro64 waterbugs test example. Whereas Terragame doesn't really send traffic to other sites.

From there it's your visitor. You can collect email addresses in a friendly non-pushy manner (i.e. cannot force email address input before can download). Your builds can have "more games" buttons in them back to your site. etc. The trick is to get these visitors, you've got to be willing to promote this site with a good link on your home page or site wide nav bar.

[Christian]

I dont think that a directory of games is a good idea, i dont think users want to spend time searching for what game is for them, compare yahoo with google, thats the difference, google its better because it does the job of searching for its customer, unlike yahoo that shows a very complex directory making the customer work hard to find what they need.
The good thing about portals top 10 is that customers dont have to search huge list to find something good they may like, the top 10 say "this games are the best, you dont have to serach for more, pick one or all of this and is all what you need", its good for the customer but bad for the developer.
We must find something that is both good/confortable/fast for the customer and developer alike. Imagine you do a portal with all that work and doest its job, except that its not popular between customers because it doesnt offer the ease of use and commodity that normal customers are allways looking for (think in google again).

[FlySim]

I think an indie portal patterned after NetFlix might work well. Ask the user to rank games they have played, then give suggestions for new games. But, it would take a TON of work to set up....

[soniCron]

Originally Posted by Christian

We must find something that is both good/confortable/fast for the customer and developer alike.

"Customers who bought X also bought..." should work fine in this regard. To be honest, you don't want the site to function like Google, because we already have Google, and it's not fulfilling the need. Searching for games when you're looking for something new isn't good enough. (How would you know what to look for? ) A solid recommendation system could really pull the site away from the crowd and equally fulfill the needs of both customers and developers alike. We need to nurture the long-tail, not just further propogate the hit-based mechanic we're used to.

EDIT: Looks like J.R. beat me to the punch!

[Christian]

Well, there is a need for trying a game before a recommendation can exist.
Recommendation is a nice feature but not enough.

What a portal does is to offer a service, and i think we must imitate NOT a search engine, i tried to say that we must create something confortable only, LIKE google does, and comparing yahoo with google i think that the differences are clear, we should i think look for something simple and fast to use as google.

And how one would know what he/she is looking for? with some well prepared questions of course!, like i stated in my previous post. One could have many many questions and the customer could stop whenever he/she wants to show the games that match its search, or the customer could answer all the questions to show exactly the perfect game tha he/she is looking for.
It would be not a search service, but more of a recommendation of game service or something like it.

[MrPhil]

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthr...iegamelist.com

[GameStudioD]

Text search just does not work for games, either with keywords or lists of games. Even if you found a search mechanic that replaces text search, the results would be returned as a list of game names. So, you are back to the same problem of sifting through game names you never heard of. This is a tough problem...

[arcadetown]

Originally Posted by Christian

I dont think that a directory of games is a good idea, i dont think users want to spend time searching for what game is for them, compare yahoo with google, thats the difference, google its better because it does the job of searching for its customer,

Something doesn't jive about your position as then why is HeavyGames already Alexa 17k ranked and growing very nicely.

Stop talking about top 10 lists! It's not fair to the members, and if not fair then it's not really this "indie portal". Plus large portals concentrate on top 10 lists to maximize sales of the best sellers, NOT provide users what they want which is quick access to a lot of games and NOT to be fair to all the contributing developers.

Yes presenting a lot of games has drawbacks. This site would overcome user confusion, like HeavyGames does, by strong categorization and providing many ways to look at games instead of just a top 10 list. It would probably drive lower conversion rates but hey free traffic...

[Tertsi]

Brian, I'm all in for the idea and willing to promote the site from my sites in return. So would it work so that the more visitors I get there, the more visitors I get from there?

[puggy]

There's loads of portals out there what makes one differrent to another?

Very little, were all a group of programmers and all i've really heard here is making a website. This is why invention is dead.

Ok, here's an idea, why not do a mix of steam and x-fire. Make a program which connects to a main server, allow people to buy the games though the program, download them for these people, check the version (auto update) etc etc.

Add in an IM system and have it record how long a player plays a certain game. That way your top 10 of the week would be which sold the most but which game was played the most.

Not only do you get a system to sell the games, but it also retains the customers though it's extra's making it easier to sell more games.

Discuss.....

[Ricardo C]

Ok, here's an idea, why not do a mix of steam and x-fire.

Because it would suck balls.

The goal should be simplicity and seamlesness. Every additional piece of software that stands in the way of the customer downloading the product, is a potential lost sale.

[Trebmint]

Perhaps I'm mistaken but the real problem is that all the ideas for portals are effectively owned by an individual, or company (which are working to make them money). This happens because developers want to put games on a portal for free, and just take the profit. However these same developers have there own sites which obviously cost in bandwidth etc, so in effect covering both worlds of more downloads, free, but smaller % and less downloads, costs, but larger %.

What I think developers would ultimately want is a portal they actually owned a part of. Now you need somebody to administer the site, but this could be an employee rather than an owner!

So what if for each game hosted had a monthly charge of $20, plus whatever the bandwidth costs for that game were. This would effectively mean owning a share in the portal for that month.

There would be any number of benefits to this communal way of doing things

1) Access to the portal newsletter
2) Complete sales figures, and percentages for every game on the site
3) Random listing of games rather than top 10, perhaps balanced to newer releases
4) A game vetting process where other developers check a quality threshold for a new game before if can go on the portal.
5) Developers could vote on royalty rates % etc
6) The portal could even perhaps make money itself which would then be shared equally

Ok - Just saying I think this is what people would like - Will it happen - Erm No. Basically any portal owned by an individual however well intentioned will always be out for that individual.
A portal which is effectively funded by the developers will be always look out for the developers.

Thats just my piece on the subject

Rob

[electronicStar]

Okay this "let's make an indie portal" thread has been repeated far too many times and IIRC the last time, the conclusion was that site owners with a lot of traffic wouldn't be so interested in associating with smallest indie producers with one or two low quality game and no traffic. Not to forget that somebody had to actually get off his/her ass and do all the work (website,banner whatever).

Here is an alternative idea that might work:
The interested indies could create (pay for hosting and web designer) a new website whose purpose would be to promote all games of the affiliated indies.
Imagine a website like TIGS only it would have an additional marketing side.
It could host blogs, reviews, whatever articles that could be of interest for the customers (I stress "the customers" not "the devellopers" .Too many indie websites seem to target an audience of programmers, geeks and nostalgics rather than a paying audience. I don't mean it should be as boring as yahoo or real main sites but it should not be programmer-fest).
The website could use a couple people to help market the games, take contacts, etc...These workers could be paid contractors or members of a comitee of indie devellopers who would take turns working on this.
Generally it would be a ressource for marketing and a tool to control the media and build up hype (sardonic laughter)

What you think guys?