Indie Games Roulette

[Codestar]

So I made a thing.

I've been working on a site for a while now to promote indie games and now it's out in beta!

http://www.indiegamesroulette.com

The idea is to give the users short 1 minute videos and information on games as a way for people to find cool games to play and a way for developers to promote their games and get them out there! So far there's a collection of indie games I adore that I added in, but also a lot from developers who have just submitted their games.

I've also got a system in place where you can "upvote games" to give them a higher chance of being rolled. You don't have to be the developer either, if you like a game, you can upvote it yourself to promote the game and it's creators.

Pretty much got this idea as a sort of chat roulette for indie games. I would love to hear some suggestions/feedback.

[Sevenstitch]

This is a really neat idea, and i hope it catches on!

Don't really have much more to say than that, looking forward to new additions to the title list.

[puggsoy]

That's a really neat idea! The first one I got (Hyper Light Drifter) already hooked my interest, but I've already got too many games I need to play so I stopped myself. I'll be sure to use it once my list starts getting small though.

The only thing I could suggest is maybe to increase the time? 1 minute isn't very long, and most trailers are longer. Obviously it's just to give you ideas, but I would personally think 2 or 3 minutes would be good, and a button to skip the current one if you're not interested. I can understand if you'd keep it 1 though, that'd still be fine (especially if this is a group project).

I'm actually in a group working on an indie game, so this would be handy for us to get a bit known as well!

[Codestar]

I'm thinking I might make it 10 seconds, the point is to rapid fire games at people for them to be able to find new games to play. To skip a game you just click the roll button again. The stop timer button stops the rolling and lets you watch the full video.

[puggsoy]

Oh hah, I didn't see those buttons. I suppose I should have taken a better look before suggesting
In that case it looks perfect, people can get random games thrown at them at their own pace if the timer gets annoying.

[TheShyGuy]

I was in the mood for checking out some games. This seemed like a good idea. I liked it. I saw Chasm. Wanted to upvote. But I gotta pay to promote other games?. I really dislike this way of promotion...

[puggsoy]

That is actually quite annoying (I hadn't noticed that either until now). I can imagine having a payment system for more than one vote, but if you want to give a game a single upvote shouldn't that be free?

Also, paying $26 to give a game a huge +100 upvotes is a bit... unfair? Some people have surprisingly large amounts of money to spend and a single person like this can completely tip the scales. I think paying a buck or two for 2 or 3 votes is OK, but this is somewhat over-the-top. Game popularity should be decided by the number of people who like it, not how much money people have.

[Kosheh]

If you're gonna have your own form of SEO you shouldn't make it that bleedingly obvious, lol.

If I Was Doing Financial Advising Here, I'd charge indie devs a flat $5 to get their content up and noticed in the roulette (first 50 devs free?)
Make each section of the site one page and add banner advertisements on each side. Given the minimalist nature of the site to begin with, I don't think they'd be all that unobtrusive to begin with.
People using ad-blockers? Redirect them to a page and ask them to disable their adblockers.

I mean, at least with ads and the flat charge you'd be able to make single votes free. because it'd generate revenue regardless of votes :V

[Codestar]

Thanks everyone for your feedback! As mentioned before, this site is in beta and isn't the final product.

I wasn't wanting to display ads to cover hosting the site (all out of pocket right now) because I felt like it would draw too much attention from the games and be spammy, but from feedback it seems that would be the better alternative. I'm in the process of taking away the Upvote system and revamping it; Any more suggestions will still be helpful. Thanks

[Sketchasaurus]

I think features that'd be nice would be: information about whether or not a game is on Steam, how much they cost or if they're free, and possibly an idea of what genre it is. I will say that I'm gonna be sending a link to this site to friends now. aha

[Kelvin]

It's not really roulette if people can change the odds of something appearing. Then you create a perpetual cycle where popular items keep appearing and getting more popular. Being able to rate is one thing, but they should all have an equal chance of showing up, otherwise, it's not roulette.

[Codestar]

Since we took out the Upvote system, the roulette is completely random now. We may re-implement the Upvotes as a sort of rating, but as it stands they all have an equal chance of showing up (unless you specify genre).

[Codestar]

So I've updated IGR quite a bit and added a few more new features.

-Now you can add in your Kickstarter information when submitting a game
-Design is responsive and resizes depending on your screen dimensions
-You can also submit a 300 character description for your game
-Changed the layout a bit to group together the UI a bit more
-Roll time is now 1: 30 instead of the previous 1 minute roll time.