[Update] We do now have nearly 500 contacts in the list and six indie studios (Broken Rules, Pixelate, Farbs, Piece of Pie, Whatever Games and yours truly) on board. If you want to join, get one of us to vote for you.
—-
Starting up as an independent developer of video games is hard. No only, because making games is hard. This is what every newbie expects. Programmers expect to write a lot of code and squash a lot of bugs. Artists expect to design and re-design the game countless times. But what people normally don’t see is that to make a living by making games, you also have to find people that will play your game. Sadly it’s not just “build it and they will come”.
Here comes in the work you normally don’t think about when going indie: Communication, Public Relations, Community Management, Distribution, Sales, Marketing, etc. … call it what you want. It’s always the same goal: make it possible for people to discover your game. Because what threatens indies the most is being completely unknown to 99.9999% of the world population.
That’s why we do a lot of research on who is writing for indie game blogs and magazines, who can get your game on a download portal, who can help with distributing the game and so on. All this information is out there, either somewhere on the internet or in the heads and spreadsheets of other independent developers. As it currently is, every indie has to do this research work on his own. Seeing how many small indies and new start-ups there are, this amounts to thousands of hours of repetitive work that is not spent on improving our games. To change this, I propose
Contacts for Indies
What’s that?
Contacts for Indies is a invitation-only contact list for independent game developers. It has contacts for media, portals, platform holders and publishers on it.
Where’s the sense in that?
Every independent developer has to talk to a lot of people to get his games out into the wild and to get people to know and play them. This is a lot of work. And nobody can take it from us. But a large part of this job is just plain and simple research, mostly googling and cold calls. I propose that we help each other out and share our contacts in one location, to keep them up-to-date and correct at all time.
ot of time wasted on this in any indie studio. And I thought that maybe we could change that.
Why should I participate? I’ve got all my contacts together. They are my business capital and I don’t want to share them.
a) To help out other indies. Because it’s nice and the right thing to do.
b) Because no one has all the contacts and noone knows everybody. Even if you’ll only gain ten more contacts, these could be the guys who could help you tip over the edge and make your game a success. There will be people on the list that you have never thought of contacting. For example: I know quite a lot of german game-biz journalists. Ever thought of contacting those guys? No? Well, I thought so. =D
c) Because updating your contacts is a lot of work and we can all save a lot of time if we go all-out wisdom-of-the-crowds and keep each other updated about changes in who is currently in charge (and in the mood) for dealing with the likes of us.
How do we do it?
As simple as possible. We’re currently using a shared google spreadsheet. Everyone who got an invitation can update it. It has a version history so if someone should accidently delete or overwrite valid information, we can revert it at any time.
Why invitation-only and not visible for anyone?
To protect the people on the list from spam. It has a reason why most journalists or business guys don’t have their e-mail adress and telephone numbers visible on the web. They get a lot of mails and calls all the time. We don’t want to make this worse by making their contact information public. But we want those who are in need of this contacts and who have a legit reason for calling (i. e. fellow indies) to be able to reach them.
I’m an Indie and I want to participate!
That’s nice. Contact me on Skype (dbltnk), Twitter (@dbltnk) or via mail (az@bitbarons.com) and we’ll get the ball rolling.
Alex Zacherl
;
;
