Free Indie Game promotion: League of Extraordinary Games

[Necromagvs]

Hello everyone,

I´d been working lately in a pland to increase the web presence of our game system and I came up with a idea that may sound interesting for the indie developers.

This idea is not implemented yet as I will like to hear your feedback first and see how this can be worked for our general benefit.

The plan:

Create the "League of Extraordinary Games". A website that gathers information about indie games, promote events and provide one single access point to bring new players to your game.

Indie designers will register for free. It is a quite simple registration: post a blog page with your game info and add the links or banner to the league in your site (if you have one).

If we all promote the league on forums, blogs or web groups the benefits will cover all games in the site.


Benefits:

First of all this will be a Free service for indie developers.

• Increase your game visibility
• Increase your web presence. (if you don´t have a website now you have a page for free!)
• Get players feedback on what they like or not in your game
• Games or books distributed with PDF could have a Download link, we can even give you the space to store the file
• Promote your presence in conventions or any game events

In case you are wondering, what we won from this: the same as other indie developers: promotion of our games.

I will like to hear your ideas about this plan and who is interested in being part of the league.

[Eero Tuovinen]

That's not a bad idea at all. I'm not the early adopter type myself, but I could see something like that being useful in general. Personally I'd go for an editorial approach ("this person here hand-picked these games to feature them, because he knows what he's doing"), but I don't see how any sort of networking and information consolidation could hurt, even if it was decentralized. I'd say that this is a "build it and they will come" sort of situation, too: if you like the idea yourself, set up the site with a nice layout, a mission statement and clear rules, and I'm sure you'll get a couple dozen participants in the bat of an eye. Why not, after all? After that you'd need to see how the audience flow through the site developed, which could go either way, but I can't see how your plan would stumble on a lack of participating publishers.

You're also right that if you're interested in getting yourself more visibility in the particular field that would be interested in this sort of site, starting it up and administering it would be sure to garner you some personal attention (as the nice guy who set it up), as well as more eyeballs for your own particular game. Not a bad marketing stratagem if you're starting from relatively low on the visibility totem pole.

Probably best to think up your feature set and specific cultural goals before you start implementing, though. If I were doing something of this sort with publisher-managed content, I'd certainly include the tools for grouping products into categories (for participants to affiliate into subgroups, for instance), as well as a nice-looking consolidated calendar function which could become a destination point for the audience interested in what's happening in the scene. And I'm sure there are other things that you could pile on to make your site a specific destination, if you wanted to work on it. Familiarizing yourself with the functionality in the current community websites (here, Story Games, RPGnet, whatever) would also be a smart step, if only to make sure that you improve on their services in the areas where you're planning to overlap.

[Willow]

I think a well-organized database would be a great way to find new and interesting and overlooked games.  (As opposed to browsing internet forums.)  I would be interested in seeing how something like this develops.

[Necromagvs]

Hi everyone,

I took a couple of hours this morning and setup a small site that can be used as the base for the project.

The site is fully functional, you can go there now and create a user profile with your game information. I invite everyone to give it a try and provide your feedback either post here or send me an email.

People that is looking for a free webpage can add a blog with their game info and we could provide a url that points to that page. The url looks like a subdomain of the kind league.suralyom.com/mygame (where mygame is your game name)

league of extraordinary games

http://league.suralyom.com

email for contact and feedback

necromagvs@suralyom.com
or
league@suralyom.com

Have a nice day everyone!

pd. if anyone knows about drupal, wants to create some cool graphics or help in any way with the site admin just let me know..

[fjj]

Note that Story Games contains a wiki of many indie games (The Codex). Recently it was discussed how to keep track of all the up and coming games - how far, they are in playtest and production etc. You may want to check this out and see if you can pool ressources somehow.

http://www.story-games.com/codex/index.php?title=Upcoming_Games

[Necromagvs]

small but important update:

I change the game submission.

Now, a team or designer can create one single user for its company or individual.

then this person can post as many Game Profiles as game they want to promote.
Each game profile will have a page. (workin on it)

[Reprobus]

What about posting foreign-language entries?

[Necromagvs]

Hi Reprobus,

I think it is possible.  what i am not so sure is how the users can filter out the different languages but will check.

which language?

[M. J. Young]

I'm not seeing how to register.  However, it might be a browser compatibility problem.  To the right of the navigation bar I'm getting

* warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/sillumin/public_html/league/modules/user/user.module on line 509.
    * warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/sillumin/public_html/league/modules/user/user.module on line 509.
    * warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/sillumin/public_html/league/modules/user/user.module on line 509.
    * warning: Illegal offset type in isset or empty in /home/sillumin/public_html/league/modules/user/user.module on line 509.

I'm using NS7.2 on a WinXP platform.

*****

Also, I don't see any rules for what constitutes an "indie" game for purposes of the site.

Thanks.

--M. J. Young

[Necromagvs]

Hello MJ.

Yes I was the error last night, and it is already fixed. You should be ok now.

As for the rules you are right I didnt add a page with detailed rules, but if you register you will see a Team size value that is needed, this is the only restrain I added. basically I am considering a team with 20+ full time staff not a indie team. Anything less than 20 full time people will be considered indie for the purposes of the site. Also, any team backed up by company that by itself has more than 20+full time people, or at least the budget to cover that, will not be considered indie. (i will add this if later).

Feel free to contact me if you need anything else.

Regards

[Reprobus]

which language?

hungarian

[JohnG]

Great idea, consider me registered.