How useful is Indie DB?
So we've trying to get our game, Hollow Knight, out there via a website, Twitter, Facebook etc. I've noticed in the screenshot saturday threads that a lot of people have set up pages on Indie DB. Just thought I'd ask what people's opinion on Indie DB is - is it worth the effort of setting up a page? And keeping it updated?
Browsing the site, every update seems to have 0 comments on it, which suggests there's not a lot of engagement. On the other hand, quite a few devs have set a page up. What have people's experiences been?
Also, I hope this counts as on-topic for gamedev. If not I'll delete it.
IndieDB is a very good platform for indies, but as with any platform, you only get anything out of it if you invest your time into keeping it up date with relevant and interesting materials. Getting your game in the top 100 and keeping it there is the key to getting traffic on your game page in IndieDB.
I for one am very happy with the site, since it helped me get attention of a lot of gamers, media and even publishers.
I agree with tulevik, you only get out what you put in. If you want to get more out of it you'll have to post. That being said, from my personal limited experience it's had the most views and maybe the most comments.
What i did was to upload our press-kit material. It took no more than 15mins to do if you already have the material.
Release a new trailer, spend another the 2mins also uploading it.
You have your own website or blog for minor stuff, but when releaseing mayor content, why not spend the few mins?
As for exposure via indiedb, i have no idea, but having your game featured on the site i like to think is kinda a stamp or a milestone. Saying, we done it, we created something, we are here with all the others.
After all, its a Data Base, its in the name.
If it brings trafic or sales, so be it.
I have my game on ModDB, as it's a module for ToME 4.
It's the same platform as IndieDB. So far, I'm very pleased - while it doesn't generate many views by itself, it's a good site to guide people to, as you can easily upload builds, images, movies or tutorials. Basically that's where I keep all the stuff except documentation, which I keep on a wikidot site.
Commenting there is pretty rare, as is voting.
holy shit what a relic of a post
Hah, wow. 8 years later - and it's regarded as one of the best metroidvania games.
Yeah, great post to stumble upon!
this iz crazy to stumble upon i was just looking up indie db for myself and then this pops up
damn hollow knight got so large
I'm happy with the site, I used it a lot for Secret of Escape to post updates. The key with posting updates is to show good relevant content and add some detail, IndieDB doesn't like short blog post updates.
Also, when you have an IndieDB account, it can be linked to a ModDB account, which also has a good community. It used to be linked with Desura as well, but I think that's no longer possible because Desura were bought.
May not give many views, but maybe it counts for the search engines?
Wouldn't surprise me search engines gave a higher weight to IndieDB than many other game sites.
Also, people tend to use those relatively well-known databases a lot when starting to research stuff (maybe not for buying, but for writing blog articles, etc.).
Hmm, the search engine thing is a really good point. It's useful to have backlinks to our site for sure.
I didn't think that would be true, so I checked a page (http://www.indiedb.com/games/gangbeasts) and the Steamcommunity.com link in the first news post does indeed pass link juice.
The way to check is to right click on a link and inspect element, if it has rel='nofollow' then you can assume Google ignores it.
It's useful as a platform if you can generate your own traffic outside of the IndieDB community. It seems to be the only people that use IndieDB are other developers, if you aren't in the top 100 your page will go largely ignored. But it's a good (and free) way to post dev-blogs and host screenshots and videos at least.
If you aren't using it for dev-blogging you're probably better off getting your own hosting and making a presskit(). Would achieve the same thing and looks far more professional.
That Which Sleeps received a lot of critical early support from IndieDB and we had some good dialogue with people as well as gaining a few important contacts. We were in the Top 100 every other day or so in the run up to our Kickstarter and we had a decent flow of traffic from IndieDB to our homepage as well as to Kickstarter.
That being said, we did receive more useful engagement when we jumped into some forums on other sites that were specific to our genre. However, those forum posts were begun by people who saw our game on IndieDB first so it helped create that possibility.
A lot of great stuff here, thanks everyone! Consensus seems to be that it's worth setting it up. Like a few of you have said too, it's really not too much effort. I'll gewt on it!
for both games i've made i have set up a indieDB page and both games got around 5000 views over the course of a couple months
Interesting read of the comments, as noted you get in what you put in, getting your news headlined, with by releasing a massive update, release post or releasing a demo is the best way to get traffic, this publishing guide should give an idea of what can be expected and what to aim for.
http://www.indiedb.com/members/tkaza/blogs/keeping-the-news-flowing
If you have any questions I'm always about to help the community.
Achievement unlocked: How did I get here?
Hi William Pellen
Damn Damn Damn!!! How did i found Hollow Knight relic while surfing 🏄
I joined IndieDB ages ago, because my other duties. Now I have here my game and IndieDB is not dead, however gamers community changed. My game is ranked from 8 (best rank I remember) place to few hundreds, and hard to say why. But for sure people still checks IndieDB and how popular it is depends on how many creators are there and if they promote their site on IndieDB and of course if there is interesting content there. https://www.indiedb.com/games/hiraeth
is it safe??
hiiii
Who knew Hollow Knight will become one of the biggest indie games of all time