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[Eketek]

I am looking for a free online gaming portal with a few qualities:

1.  Open entry, with spam control:  The site should accept games which a reasonable minimum amount of effort went into.  The site should reject spam and stolen submissions.  

2.  Contextualized Ratings and reviews:  Games should be rated, but not against every other game on the site.  Instead, I would like to see games rated on the basis of particular merits and how well the game works within applicable genres.  The site should be able to tell me whether or not people think a game is a great platformer, metroidvania, or logic puzzle, how good the gameplay, graphics, and sound are, and pretty much any other attribute people might care to rate.

3.  Minimal or no advertising:  The site should not be loaded with [irrelevant] ads and attention-stealing distractions.  If possible, the site should instead earn its money by assisting developers - selling in-game perks and full versions of their games, handling micropayments for f2p projects, collecting donations for free projects, and perhaps even providing a crowdfunding service.

4.  Self-promotion:  The site should encourage developers to promote their own projects and communicate with players (both in forums and in chat).  This should also be split up along major genres and reasonably popular ratings categories (rather than everything getting piled up in one forum and subsequently lost).  


Does anyone know if such a place exists?  If not, it might be worth discussing what it would take to build such a site, what other features it should have, and how to make it popular enough to be relevant.

[ProgramGamer]

If you can't find it, you should make it happen, it sounds like a really pleasant market to publish to.

I think that the closest to what you're describing is Newgrounds, but you probably knew about that one already.

[oahda]

The weird use of capitalisation made me think you meant the game Portal.

[dhondon]

A portal like that sounds great, but how do you keep it running with no ads?

[Eketek]

That's what point #3 is intended to address - the site would handle payments for the developers, keeping a share for itself.  (The projects hosted on the site would be the advertisements)

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

sounds like what steam could have become if it stayed with a more human touch.

[ProgramGamer]

Yeah, but Steam is a distribution platform, not a game portal. I think the closest you can find is Nitrome.com and sorry for not mentionning that earlier.

[Impmaster]

itch.io has some of the features you're looking for. It's like the hot new place for indie devs to post games, afaik. However, it's not really a portal. It's more like a shop?

I second Newgrounds for being basically what you asked for. It's got it's very unique culture though.

[oahda]

The best portal is in a sofa playing Mario Kart with some dums.

[motorsep]

Funny thing I have been looking for alternative to Steam distribution platform for PC games. Trolling and spamming reviews, lack of promotions and absence of PR/marketing services made Steam a tough place for indies to launch games nowadays :/

I as pondering the idea of making a new platform, but I am not a programmer, and it will require some bright mind to implement it.

[ProgramGamer]

A proper search engine, paypal support and an indie showcase section with personalized recommendations is probably all that you need to add to the formula. I think there was an extra credits episode about this, let me see if I can find it.

Edit: found it!

[motorsep]

I wish it was that simple nowadays