According to a recent article by Games Beat’s Dean Takahashi, the PC gaming business is estimated to hit $20 billion by 2015. Consumers looking for a quick escape or several hours of entertainment are increasingly going online to find games in place of the traditional brick and mortar retail outlet. This trend has been key in feeding the growth of the downloadable games space.
Many of the games are created by indie game developers – think two guys (or gals) in a garage. Once the game is developed, they then work to secure the attention and interest of a game publisher that can distribute the game to consumers. However, there are a limited number of publishers positioned to distribute these indie titles to the masses, and getting on their radar can be challenging.
Melissa Heidrich, studio director for PassionFruit Games, garnered the attention of a publisher through distribution of a press release. Big Fish Games contacted the company after reading coverage of the announcement on Gamezebo and subsequently published the studio’s game.
As Francisco Santos Belmonte, founder of Tip Tap Games shared, “One of the biggest challenges we face as an indie game developer is finding ways to get our games in front of publishers. Indie developers simply don’t have the resources to invest in marketing to gain visibility with users and publishers. The ability to publish and share games via the Web without installs has the potential to completely transform the indie game development community.”
Lawrence Mascia, lead designer of Bewildebeest Games, explains how his team works to grab the attention of a publisher: “What we are doing now is creating a packet of information about the game and a CD of the demo and sending it around to different offices. The biggest challenge we’ve faced is getting people to actually look at what we have, let alone play what we’ve sent.”
Given the difficulty of getting eyes on their titles, game developers are eager to eliminate every possible barrier in the courting process. And now there is a solution that will make life much easier for game developers.
Spoon, a Communiqué client, recently launched the Indie Game Garage, a free service for indie game developers that provides a radically new and simple way to distribute games to publishers and consumers.
The Indie Game Garage lets users play full desktop games directly from the Web, with no installs or downloads. Once on Spoon, games can be shared directly on websites, blogs, and social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter. Potential publishers, bloggers, trade press, and users themselves can test indie titles instantly – without worrying about setup, uninstalls, or dependencies such as DirectX and .NET. And Spoon works with existing, unmodified games.
The Indie Game Garage is available now at http://spoon.net/indiegames.
Tags: Bewildebeest Games, Big Fish Games, Dean Takahashi, Francisco Santos Belmonte, Game Beat, Game Developers, Gamezebo, Lawrence Mascia, Melissa Heidrich, PassionFruit Games, PC Games, Tip Tap Games Filed under: Consumer, News, Tech Industry