Indie Games Marketplace, Success for Everyone!

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello There!

This thread is for tell you an idea that we got one month ago, while my brother and me were developing our first marketplace content pack, Olbert’s Low Poly: Forest, that morning we had the brainBoom, an indie games marketplace for ue4 indie developers :D. probably you are just now confused :confused: let me explain the idea.

This indie game marketplace (indieMarket from now :p) would the way of the UE4 Marketplace, offer to the users a high quality store for buy and sell indie videogames developed in UE4, created by small teams like us (we are only two brothers xD), that dont have the money for big marketting campaings, offering to the indie developers an opportunity of success in this saturated industry of the videogames. The submission process can be the same as the UE4 Marketplace, you send to epic a description, images and videos of your videogame, and if epic like it, you send the videogame files for be evaluated, if the game pass the quality check(no bugs, good work and polish) Epic release it in the indieMarket.
For sell your game in this indieMarket, Epic Games get 30% of the net money on sales.

Adventages For Indie Games Developers:

Is not a secret that the actual games industry are saturated, this is equivalent to less opportunities of success for the people like us, that dont have money to spend, all the people talk about steam greenlight, but for get the greenlight right now is a thing of marketting, if your game dont make a good amount of noise it never see the light. the indieMarket that we propose, using the same submit process explained above, offer success opportunities for us, represent a light at the end of the path, if your game is good, you dont depend of the money for release it. UE4 indie devs would have a place where they are welcome to submit their games without walls and blocks more than that imposed by your creativity or talent developing games.

Adventages For Marketplace Creators

Talking about success opportunities, the marketplace is a good startpoint, sell your assets there and get something of money are not bad, but can be better, let me explain: from the first day in service, indieMarket become a magnet for indie devs looking for success opportunities, this is equivalent to more people using UE4, the most of that people would be part of small teams of two or three, inclusive one, this implies that always that teams need someone, a programmer, a designer or maybe an artist, to compensate that lame leg, automatically they would go to the UE4 marketplace and buy things that cover their needs. Obviusly this represent more solds for the Marketplace Creators.

Adventages For Epic Games

As we explain above, the indieMarket respresent a significant increase of the UE4 users, the indie devs are attracted by the idea of sell their games in a platform developed in exclusive for indie devs, this can be the rock that tilt the balance to UE4 for these devs that are deciding between Unity5 and UE4, inclusive Unity5 users can switch to UE4 only for this reason, thay know perfectly the difficult for release games and get something of it.

With all the things explained previusly, is easy deduct that Epic can get benefits from this project, 30% of the net money of the indieMarket by sell games, and the increased assets selling of the UE4 Marketplace are not a thing to take lightly.

This is already implicit in the lines above, but is good say it clear, all the games that would be released in the indieMarket need to be developed in UE4 and not in other engines like Unity.

For finish this thread, we want to get all your support for this idea, leave your opinion in the comments, sorry for the misspellings we are not english speakers, have a good day!

Whitman And Olbert.

2

dumb question; but technically I kinda can’t really understand how you sell an iOS game on that indiemarket ?

could work for traditionnal PC, mac, linux but for the other platform I’m less confident.

And I’m not so sure it would be “easier”. An editor (here it would be EPIC GAMES) quality/select process can be quite selective. There are a lot of games that got greenlit that never made it through GOG editor selection.

there is a big point that you forget: what’s the advantage for customers/players ?
(from a gamer point of view all I read is let’s make more money! - devs and epic - that’s doesn’t sounds good for me as a customer-player, because all that money comes from the customers; why should I leave steam or GOG for your indiemarket ? :P)

3

The real objective is not create another big game-distribution platform, steam is steam and i never change it for other, is give opportunities for the indie developers to success.

Epic quality/select process as you say need to be quite selective, for the customers, indieMarket offers high quality indie games, the idea are far from release games as hotcakes, one more bored than the previus, is offer opportunities, to developers that dont have money for spend in marketting and dont have contacts in the press, but have excellent games or concepts, for released their projects in some place. I need ask to you: ¿you know the quantity of excellent videogames that never see the light because the devs dont have money for keep it alive ?, im talking about games that when you play it, you say “This game go to the success”, but one week later no one remember it and is forget in the internet.

i admit that our idea are far from the perfection, at this point i never think in the Android/IOS developers, but for what reason dont put it here? other people like you can improve it and maybe Epic can see this and think that is a good idea.

4

I find your idea interesting; really for the part of having some showroom or a library of games made with UE4 with more highlight (with search hability, categories, platform, etc… more like a store). Actually, from the front page of unrealengine.com there is nothing like that (to promote the games&the engine). some time a blog news on a specific game, or else you really need to look for it to find the wiki page A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums where there are games made with UE4
its just wiki pages, that mean the data are already there most of the time with link to the steam page, official page, etc, just miss some UX element.

If epic want to turn it into a full store, why not… but I’m less confident in the fact that it’s a good opportunity “for sure” - for indies and for epic; because players already have big platform where they can found games and have discussion, etc.

for now the community of unrealengine.com for me is really centered about the creation of game (dev, creator of content&games and modding); so not really the full target market for having success selling games. I mean the marketplace make sense in terms of the target market audience already here. Your indiemarket, really less; I think it would required quite a marketing effort from epic to attract customers to turn such thing into commercial success (perhaps I’m wrong, I’m not an expert of marketing; but I guess that’s why for now list of games is just a wiki thing :stuck_out_tongue: ).

5

i think this sound good, but in my opinion what indie developers need is a website or a company for marketing indie games, with many flexible campaigns and also flexible pay methods and options.

we are indie developers and one common feature on all of us is that we don’t have big funds for our games/projects, 50% or more of the indie game developers have low and restricted funds to expend in their projects, this mean the money for the marketing in 80-90% of the situation is near 0$, also the small indie studios are always searching on the google for a “free way to market a indie game”; for my this is the real problem and a marketing company targeting the indie game community would be a good point to help the indie game developers community.