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[JustJeffy]

Hello,

I am part of a team working on a social networking site for gamers. The focus of our site will be showcasing indie developers and their games. We would like to create a place where developers can put dev dairies, previews, screenshots, early builds, and have a guaranteed audience. We feel that in an ideal world, devs should be able to spend as much of their time creating and refining their games as possible and as little time doing PR as they can get away with. So far we have built the site and are testing out its features before our official launch.

The one thing we are missing is a clear understanding of what indie developers want from a platform like ours.

At the moment we are providing Hubs (places to showcase games, get feedback, and potentially sell games) for devs, games, and genres.

Thanks for your help in advance.  

P.S. I am purposely not naming the site, because this isn't for promotion. Just knowledge.

[Bambino2012]

If that site is successful, one thing that might be handy is a way for the gamers to search games by genres, like tags, strategy games, platform games, action, etc, just an idea.

[JustJeffy]

We actually have a #tagging system. So in addition to being able to search for games according to their general tags, people theoretically should be able to see what genres are most popular on the site at any given time.

[RudyTheDev]

...people theoretically should be able to see what genres are most popular on the site at any given time.

While this may seem beneficial, it is largely useless for developers (to both find games and have their games found). After all, indie is by large niche-oriented. Take YouTube, for example. None of the popular/trending videos are what really interest me and the few broad categories are too darn broad. I cannot search properly for RPG game devlogs, for example.

What we really need is a site with a proper search and categorization. For example I want an 1)old school 2)isometric or top-down 3)turn-based 4)RPG in 5)fantasy or medieval setting games and developers. If your system could store that info and answer that query and indeed had most of the relevant stuff categorized, it would be really helpful. But the caveat is that the system then needs to be able to find all that, otherwise it's back to googling.

Anyway, just my 2c.

[JustJeffy]

Thanks for the reply. This is something we need to seriously look into. A good search system is going to be essential when dealing with the many genres of indie games. Do you know where I might be able to find a full list of indie game genres? I haven't come across one yet.

Thanks again!