Hello everybody. You don't know me. And I don't know most of you. That sucks and I want to change this. First of all: Yes, I did post an
introduction in the sticky thread. Feel free to read and abuse it. =D From now on, I'll be around here more actively and stop lurking.
Why I'm here today: I've got a pet project in my mind that I've been trying to get started for some time. I talked about this with a few fellow developers down here and as the response was very positive, I'd like to expand on this. I'd be glad if you'd take the time, read those few lines and tell me if and how we could get this to work.
Contacts for IndiesWhat's that?Contacts for Indies is a invitation-only contact list for independent game developers. It has contacts for press/media, portals, contests and platform holders.
Where's the sense in that?Every independent developer has to talk to a lot of people to get his games out into the wild and to get people to know and play them. This is a lot of work. And nobody can do this work for from us. But a large part of this job is just plain and simple research, mostly googling and cold calls. I propose that we help each other out and share our contacts in one location, to keep them up-to-date and correct at all time. This could save each of us a lot of time that we can then use to improve on our games and/or relations with those guys on the list.
Who are you, why do I propose this and what do you have to offer?I'm one of three ex-students who recently formed a small development studio named Bit Barons in Munich, Germany. We've been working on our first game (Astroslugs, a light-hearted puzzler developed with Unity) since last summer and we're now getting closer and closer to the game's release date. For this reason I've been gathering contacts for press and portals for about half a year. Recently I've brought those lists in a better form and saw that they - while they are pretty large - have still a lot of white space. I am going to do a lot of research over the next few weeks. And I know that this has both been done before countless times and will be done again countless times. There's a lot of time wasted on this in any indie studio. And I thought that maybe we could change that.
Why should I participate? I've got all my contacts together. They are my business capital and I don't want to share them.a) To help out other indies. Because it's nice and the right thing to do.
b) Because no one has all the contacts and noone knows everybody. Even if you'll only gain 10 more contacts, these could be the guys who could help you tip over the edge and make your game a success. There will be people on the list that you have never thought of contacting. For example: I've got a pretty complete overview of all german games-biz journalists that I'm happy to share. Ever thought of contacting those guys? No? Yeah, I thought so. =D
c) Because updating your contacts is a lot of work and we can all save a lot of time if we go all-out wisdom-of-the-crowds and keep each other updated about changes in who is in charge at magazines, portals etc.
How do we do it?As simple as possible. My current plan is to use a shared google spreadsheet. Everyone who got an invitation can update it. It has a version history so if someone should accidently delete or overwrite valid information, we can revert it at any time. If anyone has a better solution/idea: tell me.
Why invitation-only and not visible for anyone?To protect the people on the list from spam. It has a reason why most journalists or business guys don't have their e-mail adress and telephone numbers visible on the web. They get a lot of mails and calls all the time. We don't want to make this worse by making their contact information public. But we want those who are in need of this contacts and who have a legit reason for calling (i. e. fellow indies) to be able to reach them.
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