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Indie Game Dev Survey!

A topic by alexIndieGameDev created Aug 24, 2024 Views: 329 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 7
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Hi everyone!

As an indie game developer for several years now, I’ve experienced many challenges in our field. I’m working on a new platform to address these issues and would love your input to refine it.

Please take a few minutes to complete the survey below. Your feedback will be anonymous and invaluable in shaping a tool that better supports indie developers.

Survey

Feel free to discuss any details here or reach out to me via email (found at the top of the survey). Thanks so much for your help

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What is needed most is somewhere to promote indie games.
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You think? I feel like there are already established platforms that exist for that (such as this one). There's also many ways to promote indie games such as through social media outlets like YouTube, twitter, discord, reddit, etc...


The problem isn't really having a place to promote indie games in my opinion, it's more the difficulty of making your game stand out and get recognized. A combination of a sticky game and marketing skills is what gets your game popularity. A platform can't really help you with that.

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These other platforms you mention don't really want to see self-promotion, often times it is regarded as spam. All of them are also working very hard to make it so that you have to pay them to have any visibility at all.

This platform can be seen more as hosting and selling. It makes available some measures of promotion, like dev logs, but these are not very effective to that end. A lot of good games get lost in the traffic here.

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True, but I feel like that is just how things work when you have a saturated market and only a small percentage of the games can be "winners". It's expected that the majority of games will be lost in the traffic.

Ah, I assumed you wanted to fix something that needed fixing.

If you are set on implementing a site to post gamedev classifieds, you'll be stuck trying to get users from the sites you mentioned, which already have this feature.

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If I do the exact same thing as these other sites, then yes. I was simply trying to get a feel for what is needed by developers in the industry. Marketing was just one of the many options I listed there. But there are many big name marketing platforms as well. I appreciate your opinion that marketing is a challenge as an indie dev and as one myself I agree. I was just stating how there are several big name, established sites that help promote/market your game already. But no matter how good the platform is, if you don't have a game that people want to play, it won't become successful.

If a platform could magically make anybody's game a hit, then anybody and everybody would be millionaires from making games.

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And to follow up, I'm not saying that it can't be done. I 100% agree with you that marketing an indie game is frustrating. There are definitely some great games that go unnoticed. I was just saying there are only so many tools a platform can give you to become noticed and existing platforms provide most of these tools. The rest is on you to stand out.

I participated in your survey and I hope it helps you. 

I also participated in the survey.

Participated!

As an indie game dev, I had no choice but to select everything on the first question lol.