Comments on: Where To Start Building Community…

By: Leroy 'The 1nteger' Frederick

Leroy 'The 1nteger' Frederick — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:41:04 +0000

@Alfred plus the money you save especially if / when your product reaches it’s shelf-life. :)

By: Alfred Reinold Baudisch

Alfred Reinold Baudisch — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 12:53:02 +0000

I think having everything under the same domain and subdomains is the best approach:
- blog.domain.com
- gamename.domain.com
etc.

This way you add value to your domain and even to your company’s name.

Look at big studios: even for multi million games they keep the site under
their belt:
http://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadredemption
http://www.rockstargames.com/IV
http://www.bungie.net/Projects/Halo3
simcity.ea.com

That’s some kind of internet marketing, as I said, to add even more value to the company’s name, as everyone looking for a big hit title will need to access the main site, or at least, the domain,

By: Dave Toulouse

Dave Toulouse — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:33:34 +0000

@Juuso: yeah, I heard that too … To be fair I had to cut some of the work because between the blog, main website updates, forums management and actual coding … ModDB was part of the stuff I cut because it was impossible to manage. Probably that with more work dedicated to it the results would have been better.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:37:59 +0000

Mr Phil: yeh, if you want to mix company site + gaming sites to several blogs, that’s just fine (we discussed/argued this at the Insiders forum, didn’t we ;))

I think there’s 2 schools here on this. One site seems to work just fine for many devs.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:11:59 +0000

Thanks guys for the comments, all this makes it even clearer to me to use the blog.

Later today I also thought that with blog, you can update stuff to twitter (for those who want to use it), you can publish in facebook (for those who prefer that)… and like hermitC: expansion options are superb.

@Dave: hmm, I’ve heard good word about moddb. I don’t have any examples though, so… maybe it doesn’t work for everybody.

By: MrPhil

MrPhil — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:11:06 +0000

I’ve noticed that most indie’s tend to have a blog integrated with the company site, not specific to the game.
ex. http://www.wolfire.com/ http://www.winterwolves.com/ http://www.puppygames.net/ http://www.positech.co.uk/

By: Dave Toulouse

Dave Toulouse — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:58:35 +0000

My own experience with ModDB is that there’s more devs or people that are trying to get noticed there than an actual crowd of players. Maybe that’s the nature of my games or just bad luck but it didn’t helped at all so I’m not putting energy in this anymore.

I’d go with a new blog too and maybe expand later to a forum once there’s actually enough people/content for the place to be alive. You already have a nice network to make people aware of this new blog so it’s not like you’re starting from scratch anyway.

As for mixing dev/player content on the same blog it doesn’t work very well from my experience. I don’t have the time to handle a new blog so I deal with the consequences but obviously people come with expectations and if the content doesn’t match their expectations they are gone faster then you can post your next subject.

By: hermitC

hermitC — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 11:45:34 +0000

I think a blog is the best solution:

- simple setup
- extensible as you like (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.)
- today’s visitors are familiar with blogs
- plain sequential posting compared to parallel posting in forums
- people can reply to your progress, give feedback, rate, etc.
- people can’t run their own threads, they have to follow your way
- small overhead of registration, moderation, security, etc.
- full control over your content
- social network integration
- no common rules like xxxDBs have, you define them yourself

Thanks for this post. It made me thinking in advance which solution I should use for publishing the Nordenfelt demos.

By: Soren Andersen

Soren Andersen — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:24:51 +0000

You should totally check out the new http://www.indiedb.com/ It’s ModDB only for indies :)