If you are an independent game developer you know how difficult it is to get your game out to the masses like big companies do like EA or Bungie. As Michael Gnade (Co-founder & Business Development) and Daniel Liebner (Co-Founder & Programmer) showed us at the March edition of Philly Tech Meetup, their new website IndieGameStand sells one indie game every four days. The twist, is that you the consumer decide what price you want to pay for the game, whether it be $.25 cents, $10 or more.
On the site, they show off how many purchases have been made, statistical data, and 10% of the proceeds of the game purchases go toward the charity of the indie game developers' choice. As Dan showed in the demo, an indie game developer can upload videos of the game, screenshots, text information, as well as files of all types. The interface is very fluid and interactive, featuring Ajax drag-and-drop functionality. They definitely made a simple and easy to use platform for developers to upload their game content. There is also a marketing section for developers to send emails out to the people who bought their game.
They launched the site on Sept. 26th, 2012, and since then they have acquired roughly 31,000 users with revenue close to $100,000. That's pretty impressive for a start up in this saturated space. And they do have a lot of competitors, the main one being HumbleBundle. Mike said his differentiator was, "being a fan of indie games, I kept finding myself buying the same game over and over again because they were in a bundle. I wanted to put a spotlight on one particular game instead of a bundle of games, and every four days, which is about 100 games a year." Another cool feature, is that IndieGameStand lets you have any platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) so that you don't have to have all of them to buy a game.
They have a great incentive system built into the site as well to cause buyers to pay more for the games then they might originally intend to. Their presentation video shows this in action, if you want to check it out click here. In the meantime, go over to their site and check it out, browse the game for sale, and let me know what you think overall!
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