Hello everyone!

Because this is my very first post on this board, allow me give a small intro: First off, apologies. I'm not even a game developer myself I'm a 21 year old law student with interests in law (obviously), economics, foreign languages/cultures and all kinds of computer technology, games in particular. I did some basic modding a few years back and this lead me to become one of the leaders of the Revora Creative Network, a small/medium network of mostly RTS modding sites. Over the years we've gone from a fansite to something comparable to a small non-profit organisation. We have our own dedicated server and offer free Web- and SVN-hosting to mod projects. We're also big fans of independently developed games and now we're looking to build a site in support of small-time game developers.

Our current idea is to have a site where developers can create profiles for the games they're working on in the style of IndieDB, but more focused on the early development stages. People will be able to list jobs and single tasks for other developers to help them. The user profiles will also be customisable so people can put together their own simple game development portfolio. They will also be able to apply for our full hosting which includes 5 GB webspace, 20 GB bandwidth, a subdomain, PHP, MySQL, e-mail accounts, FTP and SSH access and Subversion repositories. All of this will be completely free, of course.

So much for our plan. Now I'm curious about yours:

[size="4"]What would you like to see in an indie game development website?

Please tell me your opinions and ideas. Also, please don't hold back with criticism, even if it might be harsh. After all we don't want to waste time and effort for something that has no audience. Unfortunately our means are somewhat limited, as we operate mostly on advertisement income and donations. However, we do want to make a difference

You're looking at it. ;-)


Since you're basically trying to advertise an alternative to GDNet here on GDNet, you'll have to do a bit of salesmanship. Why should I go to your site instead of this one, which already has a long track record, established history, decent lineup of services, and a phenomenal community that includes people from all across the game development spectrum?


Not trying to be a jerk about it, mind you; just skeptical. And I'll be the first to admit to my heavy bias, so you'll have to work against that, too ;-)

Thanks for the feedback. Mind you, we're definitely not looking to build an alternative to GDNet; that would be utterly pointless. More like something to complement it. We're interested in what people would like to see from a site that is not yet covered by the "big players". Features that would be helpful to people just getting started developing their project. The community and discussion aspect is formidably covered by GDNet so we're not going to focus on that (in fact, our intention would be to send people here for help).

But as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong), GDNet does not offer things like free profile pages, webhosting or sub-forums for individual projects, right? I guess there are more features that people, especially small projects in early development, would find useful but can't find yet. And just to prevent any misunderstandings: I'm not advertising here. Seeing as our site doesn't even exist yet I'd have a hard time doing that anyway. I'm really just looking for ideas and feedback.

Also, if I was part of the team here I'd certainly also be biased. It's a great site so that's quite understandable

First off, keep in mind you've caught GDNet in the bit of a transitional period where we're busy cleaning up and revamping a lot of site design and feature stuff; so a lot of these areas are still short on polish and/or in desperate need of some updates:

• The GameDev Showcase is a pretty decent solution for showing off completed projects.
• The Marketplace is shaping up to be a good way for people to share assets etc. and even make some pocket change off it
• GDNet+ members should have access to a modest web hosting service; not sure what the status of that is at this exact moment, but it's definitely something we've offered in the past
• By virtue of being attached to a well-established community, all of these features offer very good exposure (at least potentially)
• We also now offer SVN/Git hosting via a partnership with Beanstalk
  
  Yeah, it's not free. Yeah, we don't offer custom email accounts. Yeah, we lack custom sub-forums.
  
  But:
  
  
  • Running a service like this can be very expensive. If you have no cash-flow model, you're in for a nasty surprise when your datacenter bills start rolling in. Free is nice for end users; free sucks for service providers.
  • Custom email accounts are a dime a dozen across the web, and we've seen minimal demand for them here anyways
  • Vanishingly few projects will ever accumulate enough interest or traffic to merit their own sub-forums
    
    Keep in mind that most "indie" or hobbyist projects are very small teams, even solo endeavors, and that the need for things like full-blown websites, email, forums, etc. is virtually non-existent. Most people here would rather be making games than administrating a business; those who do want to be running a larger project already have plenty of resources for doing so across the web. Frankly, I don't see the need for yet another entrant into that market space; and unless you have a wicked business model up your sleeve, all this free stuff is going to cost you a pretty penny, and that makes your plan highly unviable in the long term. You have too much competition, no monetization strategy, and no differentiation to attract customers. Attaining critical mass is going to be a vicious uphill fight, if it's even possible.
    
    Going back to demand for a moment - I just don't see it. When I was freelancing, taking care of email, running my forum, and maintaining my website were all annoying distractions from doing interesting (and paying!) work. Now that we have such a diversity of digital distribution systems out there, especially in the mobile space where indies are tending to gather these days, the need for custom infrastructure is all but gone. And nobody really wants to spend their time moderating a forum for their game or mod project anyways - and our own staff certainly doesn't need the extra workload.
    
    
    Please don't take this as a dismissal of your idea; I'm not trying to run you out of town ;-) I just disagree that such a thing even needs to exist right now, and I feel like there's not going to be a huge number of really constructive replies to this thread. There's a big gulf between hacking on games on the weekend and running a genuine project across a large number of people, and serving those two audiences requires very different approaches. I simply feel like trying to make those worlds collide is setting yourself up for disappointment.

Either you have your own website, forums and e-mail server OR you don't need it. There really isn't much anything inbetween. I think it's fair to say that if sub-forums were needed they'd exist - but there really is no demand for it out there.

Indie game projects suck. The indies that actual have registered business, that actually make money, buy their own websites, don't need profiles. Any project that is "indie" that is worth mentioning will have taken it upon themselves to do the work of getting their name out there. moddb.com is a more indie project site than here, which is QandA.