I’ve just come back from the IndieCity*

Recently, Blitz Games launched IndieCity, a publishing service for independently developed games. Having heard how difficult and random it is to get your games on Steam I thought I’d take a look at what they had on offer.

Thoughts on service:

• Anyone with an indie game (and they are quite specific that you must be a small/lone dev only) can sign up as a developer, submit a game and get it on the site at your own price: very welcome and they sound far less like gatekeepers (a la Steam) and more like caretakers
• Any game will suffice, including game jam titles and arty stuff that might not even count as a ‘game’:  again a very interesting choice although quality control could be an issue, however…
• Customer rating on games: they say this should allow the cream to rise to the top, so less content and quality filtering by themselves leaving it to customers to rank titles – and we all know they are the harshest critics of all!
• 75% revenue share, 85% if you include their SDK which summons forth from hell allows achievements and leaderboard integration:  if they sign up 100 games before the end of the year, the share goes up for everyone.
• Indiecity Underground: Alpha/Beta/Full release testing, pay-to-finish with complete freedom on how you charge or don’t for each step along the way, including upgrades between each and peer-review process tied to store release:  very nice to have the ability to do this, but considering the number of games from lone devs that have appeared on forums then vanished from existance within a few months I wonder how they are going to police this when devs start disappearing with people’s alpha-testing money with no full release ever arriving. It’s inevitable really, so I hope they have procedures in place.

Thoughts on website:

• Why do I have to sign up just to browse the store? How irritating. This almost puts me off the entire site. Let me browse, play trailers and get demos to my hearts content and when I take the plunge and pop something in my basket to buy THEN and ONLY THEN make me sign up for an account.
• You have to download and install a download client to download the downloads. It’s like I’m back in the 90s. The only client I’ve ever installed is the GOG.com one because I love those guys. But Indiecity are a brand new player in town and they need to make it as quick, simple and as easy as possible for people to just get to and download the games. Every extra step, web page, click is losing customers and is, to be honest, giving me doubts about bothering to sign up at all.
• There are still some areas not complete such as the search bar, users own XP/achievements next to games you have bought and the customer review function.

I will be keeping my eye on this to see how it develops over time but it shows promise if they can reduce the front-page to download number of steps. If it works out I can see this being a hit along the same lines as Smashwords was for ebooks – a simple way for creators to get their ideas out to their audience that doesn’t rape them on revenue percentage, rights, uncontrolled pricing or tightly controlled exposure.

Links:

http://developers.indiecity.com/   – Developer info page

http://store.indiecity.com   – you might get taken straight to a sign-in page, if not you can click on one of the scrolling game images and get linked straight to a game so you can at least get some idea of how the ruddy thing looks and works without having to give them your firstborn

http://forum.indiecity.com/index.php   – Forum index with some interesting discussions and info in there already

* And if you get that reference you can officially call yourself old  >>sob<<