The past few months have been rough for me financially and emotionally, while I'm getting back on track, I feel Indie Devs has, so far, succeeded and failed in a few perspectives.
Right now Indie devs has 129 members, a startling amount compared to what I first predicted. 2010 is a fresh start and I was hoping to get some fresh opinions on how everything is going. I feel writing articles for specific projects during IGOTY is a little unfair as it might put the spotlight and ultimately get a project to win. (In my opinion).
In a way Indie Devs has definitely succeeded, with a lot of the Indie projects putting linked updates on the group profile, finding and following Indie projects is now quite easy.
On the other side of things, I really feel more can be done for the group. Hence this article.
Just put down your opinion on what the Indie Devs can start doing, or do better. Podcast? Video Reviews? Tutorials? Place your thoughts down, or PM me if needed.
I look forward to everyone's replies.
Still nothing?
Hmm... I was a little disappointed that of the top 100 games on moddb, only 11 indies made it this year, although when competing for votes against mods on moddb, I suppose that isn't too surprising. Maybe we could hold an unofficial Indie Game of the Year award ceremony, allowing indie games who didn't make the cut for IGOTY 2009 to still participate in the hype around now. This way, indie games would be pushed to make a lot of news posts around now, even if they didn't get in to IGOTY, increasing the exposure to indie games. Indie Devs would sponsor the event, but would not make any posts about any individual game (so as not to skew the voting of IGOTY) until we announce the unofficial winner, which we should do after IGOTY.
Also, we still should do the podcast that you tried to start up a while ago. I think that was a good idea, and we shouldn't just let it die.
Actually, if the point of the "unofficial" awards is to get indie games to make more news posts, why don't we make the voting as follows: For each news post from the beginning of the contest, we total the number of comments of those news posts and use that as the number from which to rank indie games. This way, the more news posts you make, the better, and the better the news post is, the more comments it will get, the better. And this way, even if a lot of the community doesn't know about the voting, they can still comment and give support to their favorite indie games. I guess this is more of a competition for making good news posts, but that is a good idea too.
I like your thinking here, but I'm a little confused on what you mean.
So I announce the contest after IGOTY finished, then each indie game that creates a news post is rated by how many unique comments it gets.
So really this seems like more of a contest that you don't need to know all about to support an indie game? Well it makes sense. I wonder if there is a way to refine it.
I haven't fully worked out all the small details - but yea, something like a contest. Being able to support the indie game without explicitly knowing about the contest is a very good benefit to this voting scheme, as that way we can get the whole community to participate (if unknowingly).
So, right now, we ask for signups for the contest, and then start the contest after IGOTY. Any indie game that wants to participate can. We could just automatically sign up all indie games, but that would mean we would have to check the news posts of all the indie games (there is perhaps a way to automate this?). Then, when we announce the start of the contest, we count the number of comments each news post gets since the start until the end of the contest, and use that number to rank the games that had signed up. We could check through each news post and count up the number of unique news posts, however, this could be a lot more work, and I am skeptical if people would post a lot of bogus comments just to boost their ranking in the contest (as those bogus comments would be publically viewable, which would look bad for both those who did and didn't know about the contest).
Basically, the idea is to encourage indie games to make a lot of news posts, and making a competition is not only fun, but also achieves this goal using the competitive spirit of the indie game developers.
I've written up some ideas. I've got a much better mic since last time as well, I think we can make this work.
Personally I had no clue this group existed until this page linked to it: Moddb.com