kjbk

Well, you could provide a more visible "indie" tag or category, to start with.

Although it shows "indie" somewhere under extended information for some games, that isn't all too obvious. It should maybe be more obvious to indie developers that they can tag their games that way (I looked up a couple of indie games, some have the category, some don't). If you plan on pushing indie developers, you could have an "indie of the week" on the front side.

Searching for "indie" games isn't very straightforward, the search box doesn't do much for that purpose. There is a way of getting to see all indie games (I just have that list open) but it's so complicated to get there that I already forgot how I did! :-)

A few things I noticed looking at the site for 2 minutes 15 minutes:

I was going to say that the ranking is tightly compressed in the uppermost quartile, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all on a second look, it's the sorting which is somewhat queer. If I click on Windows, I get 99/100 ranked on the first game, and it shows "sort rating, date, title". On pages 671/672 you find some 76/100 games (84/100 on last page for Linux). Which gives the impression that a 76/100 rating corresponds to "the worst game ever".
But it turns out that if you click on the sort button again, it actually sorts games by rating, going down from 100 to 13 on page 113, then follow the unrated ones.

If I understand the FAQ correctly, you have some kind of karma system where karma increases as you do something (anything, basically?) and karma finally unlocks moderator/admin privileges. It thus does not seem like there is necessarily much of a correlation between a game's developer and what's being posted on your site (is that an accurate perception?). If for example a post appears about an upcoming game from some studio, or some announcement of a planned update, or a release date -- are there any means of making this authorative in some way? Community-managed sounds great (especially because it's free), but if you look at e.g. Stack Overflow, you will notice that it is not always the greatest idea when it comes to correctness. This is something that may greatly matter to indie developers (especially if, for example, they miss a release date which they never knew about).
Wouldn't it make better sense to leave control about the entries to a game to the respective owner? Or maybe I'm just not understanding properly.

There is "most hyped games" visible on the front page next to "best rated". While "best rated" is pretty much self-explanatory, it is not nearly as obvious as what "most hyped" is supposed to mean. There appears to be no public explanation (at least none that I found).
Yes, of course, I finally figured out what it means... but you need to visit a not-yet-released game's profile to learn what it means. It's just not obvious for someone visiting the front page (arguably, the reason why it's on the front page is that it's the first thing visitors see!).

The forum failed the 4-second test on me on the first attempt (not sure if that number which is over 10 years old still applies, might as well be 1-second nowadays) as did the main site when switching back from the forum. Clicking on "blog" did pass the 4-second test, but just barely.
Funnily, it seems to load much faster if you just copy-paste the URL into the address bar. You then don't have that little green progress bar, but it seems much faster (but maybe that's an illusion?). Now it seems to take about 2 seconds to load.
The website as a whole otherwise passes the 50ms blink test and the overall impression test very favourably.

Firstly, thanks for such a deep review, it's exactly the kind of input we need at the moment.

We have not touched our home page design in a while and it deserves some love. As you say, there must be a handy link to indie-oriented information added to the home page.

Sorting on platform pages looks like there is a UX bug there. I've opened an issue to look into this.

Karma points are given for accepted additions to entities on the site. For example, adding a release data to a game would create a change group that is verified by staff and only then does the change appear on the website. Still, this method is prone to human error and cannot be considered authoritative. Much like wikipedia, our end game would included measured and trusted moderators and automated bots to counter inaccuracy. For now, although we are very happy with the community contributions and data, we are not in a position to claim that we have 100% accurate data.

We are currently working on a system where people can claim their own developer profiles but I think claiming game pages would overstep the line and each page would essentially become a sales page which is not what we are going for. I could be wrong, this is just a personal opinion but it's an interesting subject we have not discussed internally very much.

'Most Hyped' could refer to games from the past so this is certainly misleading. This is another issue that we can solve when we revisit the home page design.

We are deploying new code today so it may be a little slower that usual. We have some optimizations to do but essentially the loading bar is an honest representation of all the background tasks that occur after the page has loaded such as ajax requests.

This is great stuff, thank you!

We are currently working on a system where people can claim their own developer profiles

1. You tell them: I own that particular site, give me a certificate for it.
2. They reply: OK, if you really own that site, make sure we see 941324764516173465 if we try access https://yoursite.com/754154565465465465/
3. You generate an index.html with the desired contents inside a folder with that number... and tell them "OK, go for it".
4. They retrieve the URL and see the number they expected, and acknowledge that you own (or, at least, control) that site.
5. You get your certificate.

It's soooooooooooo primitive, but ingenious at the same time. Can you exploit it? Well, yeah, probably... but it's reasonably safe, it works, and it works automatically without human intervention. They even supply an automated script which you can use with a cron job to renew certs every year, so it more or less works automatically, without human intervention on either end.

We are currently working on a system where people can claim their own developer profiles

Have a look at how the ACME protocol in Let's Encrypt works, it is really awfully trivial, but that's what makes it so awesome.

1. You tell them: I own that particular site, give me a certificate for it.
2. They reply: OK, if you really own that site, make sure we see 941324764516173465 if we try access https://yoursite.com/754154565465465465/
3. You generate an index.html with the desired contents inside a folder with that number... and tell them "OK, go for it".
4. They retrieve the URL and see the number they expected, and acknowledge that you own (or, at least, control) that site.
5. You get your certificate.

It's soooooooooooo primitive, but ingenious at the same time. Can you exploit it? Well, yeah, probably... but it's reasonably safe, it works, and it works automatically without human intervention. They even supply an automated script which you can use with a cron job to renew certs every year, so it more or less works automatically, without human intervention on either end.

I think something like this is pretty much a necessity. Otherwise someone could request ownership of Minecraft, and release a keylogger/phisher, and publish it on your site as a new version in a blog post.

We look at their sign up email, if its a company email that its alot easier.

Most indie devs don't have company emails though. A lot of devs, myself included; though I'm just a hobbyist, use GMail and other free services.

On IGDB.com we give Indie games the same level of exposure as commercial games.

You shouldn't make claims like this when they're so obviously false, as it will turn some people away.