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[bluescrn]

Has anyone ever attempted such a thing?

Essentially, implementing some of the most useful features of Xbox Live in a way that indie developers (those that aren't on XBLA, Steam, etc) can integrate into their games for a (hopefully small) fee? To begin with, account management and leaderboards, maybe achievements and 'indiescore' (but potentially matchmaking, auto-updates, maybe DLC, cloud savegames, or even whole game sales eventually?)

I asked a question on gamedev.stackexchange, more specifically about leaderboard systems, and wasn't exactly overwhelmed by lists of options:

http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/7589/online-leaderboard-systems-for-small-indie-pc-games

So has anybody attempted such a system/service already? Is it just too big a task? Are the bandwidth/hosting costs just likely to quickly become prohibitive?

Or would it just be 'not indie enough' to support something like this?

I'm thinking primarily about Windows/Mac/Linux games, but there's no reason that web-based and mobile platforms couldn't be supported too.

[HyperNexus]

MochiMedia does this sort of thing for Flash. Unfortunately they don't make the equivalent API's for C/C++ which according to your question on Stack Exchange was what you were after.

There is also Steamworks but you need to be on Steam to use that.

EDIT: A friend of mine is working on RoarEngine. It doesn't do what you are after but it has the potential to expand into that area. They've just started up and are very open to suggestions. Maybe you could drop them an email.

[mcc]

I was basically thinking Steam.

I don't think this should be too hard for someone to develop. It might be a little tricky that indie games tend to use a wider variety of platforms/languages than what you might see on Steam, but make a JSON interface and then write little libraries for C++ and GameMaker games and that should cover near everyone.

What I'd worry about, and I don't know if a steam-like indie "authority" would be have the resources to even begin to do anything about, is cheating. Dealing with cheaters is the reason I didn't bother putting leaderboards in my game when it would have been nearly zero work to add it in on top of the level server I'd already implemented,and the problem sounds even harder to deal with when the server is run by some big disinterested third party. Steam can at least sort of do something about this because they're installing all the games in addition to serving as the leaderboard server.

There are like three XBL/Steam/Achievements/Leaderboard services that sprung up for iPhone and are now redundant because Apple's actually making a go at doing it seriously with GameCenter. OpenFeint or whatever. Are any of those services branching out to Android/PCs?

EDIT: How close does Kongregate get to what you want?

[Core Xii]

http://www.desura.com/

I understand this is like an indie Steam.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

does it have stat tracking and a centralized server?

I used it about 9 months ago during the beta and it seemed basically like a download/categorize/launch client.

[Evan Balster]

For whatever it's worth, I'm actually planning to release a crossplatform launcher/autoupdater utility I plan on making in the next month or two.  It'll check a text-file at a configured URL, download a compressed archive, and extract it into an application data location.  On subsequent runs, it will check for new version IDs and overwrite old files.

Essentially Minecraft's launcher, but opensource(?) and for executable-format games.  If people like it, I could add more configurable features later on.


Honestly, I really like the idea being discussed here other than the potential overhead of needing to have a separate client program through which to operate.  If the same system could integrate with directly-downloaded games, that would be most excellent.  I build all that infrastructure for myself, but I've got webspace and a server-box.

Of course, I'm thinking of this as a freeware-oriented system, which it very likely would not be.

[bluescrn]

http://www.desura.com/

I understand this is like an indie Steam.

Had heard of that before (then forgot the name) - looking at it now and it seems a little less indie than expected (looking at the games selection) - more a wannabe Steam competitor?

No obvious mentions of leaderboards/achievements/social features on their site, though, seems very much a distribution platform at the moment (although it did take Steam a while to add some of the nicer stuff)

Wondering about how an 'indie online' network could be funded. Really, it has to be open to free games if it's going to take off. I wonder if the system could be some sort of mesh, where developers host a 'node' of the system with enough capacity for their own game(s)?  Ideally, it'd be built on easily-hosted technolody, such as PHP/MySQL - but I can't imagine that scaling up well enough to work with 'indie megahits' such as Minecraft?

The API would need a lot of care, too, to avoid buggy games spamming too many requests to the server(s), keeping data compact and throttled.  And then we'd need a port of the API to a wide variety of platforms/languages...

If the primary method of browsing achievements/leaderboards/stats was web-based (rather than in-game), maybe it could be ad-supported to some extent?

As for cheating, with a big enough community, it may not be much of an issue? Let the users report suspected cheats with a couple of mouse clicks, and appoint a small community of 'moderators' to deal with them?

[bengrue]

There was this proof of concept site:
http://www.getachievements.com/

made by Tig's own Jeff Lindsay (and logo by Derek), but it's currently in need of some code-love.  Jeff's lost the source and it wasn't in git, but I've been interested enough to ressurect it lately...