Last month, Brian wrote about the lack of indie labels for game developers, and the opportunities that could be afforded by those labels.
I think there’s another aspect of the music industry that could be applied to indie games, and that is a service such as Topspin or Bandcamp. These services provide one-stop-shops for artists to handle marketing, distribution and sales of their music. They also provide analytics, allowing the artists to gain some insight into where their fans are coming from, what they’re listening to, and so on. Basically, they just sit behind the band’s website and deal with all the boring but important things such as credit card processing and providing downloads. I think it would be a huge boon if such a service existed for indie games.
Now, yes, it is possible to put all the relevant components of such a service together, particularly in a games company which is full of tech people: but if you want to make games, why would you want to devote too much time to that aspect? Wouldn’t you be better off actually using the time it would take to do that and making your game even more awesome?
-David (@dwlt)
But, aren’t the portals like Bigfish for those purposes? Or do those examples you gave do more than the portals themselves?
(sorry if the question sounds dumb… I’m a bit ignorant of what happens between game production and commercialization).
I view portals as being like record stores or iTunes in this case – but the artist still wants and needs to maintain a connection directly with their fanbase. Basically, what I’ve proposed here is that there should be a service that allows developers to power the sales and distribution from their own site. It should also allow mailing list management and other marketing features. Like I said in the bit above, most developers can probably pull together that themselves, but I know from my point of view I’d rather just buy such a service instead.
-D
Good point.
I’m writing another article soon, on freelancing, and it will touch a bit here and there about this sort of subject, I belive…
Got to think a little bit more on this!
Cool – remember and let us know when it’s published!
-D