Free Marketing through Let's Play channels

Hey guys,

After almost 2 years of hard work, Indie Ignition has finally entered open Beta (http://www.indie-ignition.com). It is a distribution platform that gets your games into the hands of YouTube Let’s Play channels. And the best part? It’s completely free with 0% commission on sales. We launched 24 hours ago and already have over 100 users registered, including 60+ Let's Play channels with over 150,000 subscribers combined!

It’d also be great to get feedback on the site during the Beta period. If you have any comments or questions feel free to post them below. Good luck!

 

well damn.

signed up.

discovered it's only for desktop games...

 

Interesting concept. The site looks nice, too!

Out of curiosity, how does this function as a business if it's free for both sides?

 

What's with the redirection link? That's either a sign of incompetence, or something dodgy going on.

 

Yeah I got some fb re-direct that didnt work, so put the address straight in.

 

Woops, my bad with the link - I copied it from my Facebook post so the redirection link came over too. I'll correct it now.

The site sells one time purchases called Boosters to Developers that give their game more exposure for a 24 hour period by displaying it a the top of the home page etc.

User feedback has been really positive so far and over 120 users have signed up in less than 48 hours

 

Looks really good. I've signed up, it was in my plans to contact Youtubers, looks like this will be the place to do it.

Edit: Notice you are saying that you will not take commission from sales, but on the Wallet in the Dashboard there's a column called Commission. Maybe you could just put that commission is 0% in small-print/italics below the spreadsheet instead?

 

WIll definitely find some use for this in the future - if it stays free that is - it's usually free until the audience becomes big enough

 

It's cool you created this service. I am curious if you have a plan to deal with this problem?

I don't think you will have any problem with getting game devs to sign up. In fact, if someone wanted to start a business I think such a thing would be almost guaranteed to work. So that part I am not thinking about.

The part I am thinking about is ultimately there are only so many Let's Play channels out there (with any meaningful number of viewers) and many times over that amount in games seeking exposure.

Are you planning on capping the number of game submissions overall? Per category? Or the number of game devs? Etc. Basically just wondering how you plan on keeping the service beneficial for the game devs who sign up. Ultimately, the only way to do this seems to be to limit the number of games (or at least the number of game devs) you allow in.

 

Hey Gar,

Games are currently limited to commercial titles on PC, Mac, and Linux which does cut the number of games down considerably. Right now we've got the exact opposite problem - loads of Let's Play channels have signed up but there's a shortage of games! I've advertised on Reddit, a number of forums, and Facebook groups and while plenty of developers have signed up, only a small portion have uploaded their games so far. Hopefully this will change shortly

 

Will definetly take a look later

 

Yeah Im going to sign up. Are you going to check that these Lets players arent just trying to get free downloads (IE they got a big enough channel)

 

When a Let's Play channel attempts to register they must login in to their YouTube account via Google's API allowing us to verify their ownership of the account and also retrieve their subscriber count. Let's Play channels need at least 100 subscribers to join, and are divided up into 4 tiers based on subscriber numbers. You can set a different discount for each tier

 

Okay is it possible to give them steam keys instead?

 

Yeah, you can use Steam keys as individual license keys and set the download link to the game's Steam page

 

Does it allow free to play games? i.e with IAP?

 

Free games aren't supported as the purpose of the website is to provide discounted games to Let's Play channels. Mobile games are also not supported at this time.

 

It took you 2 years to create an average looking wordpress website?

 

That's lame. Maybe some discount code available for IAP would work?

 

It was probably much more effort on networking with individuals, back end services, and other related task and much less actual web page development. But go ahead and keep on being condescending, it's so cool.

 

I've run a quick query of their website's wodrpress and it's pretty much just a big bunch of common plugins combined with a modified stock theme by http://windcompanionwebdesign.com who is also the author of the website (I know this because wodrpress has an option for developers to write who is the author).

And since they hired that professional firm to design the website I doubt it took them 2 years to get it to beta.
I'm not saying they could have done it in a day, but 2 years just seems bizarre to me.

Also your argument about the back-end being complicated I can't dispute, because I'm not a user of their services and don't know all of the stuff they offer. But I must say the features they list really don't look like something that would take years to make.

 

I thought up the concept of the website back in July 2014 and iterated on it for over a month to nail down all the details. The design was created by a New York based company in September 2014, and was completed in January 2015 after many iterations and being funded by myself.

Being a university student I couldn't afford to fund the development of the website myself so it went into hibernation until August 2015, at which point I acquired funding from an angel investor. This money was used to hire a freelance web designer and the implementation was completed mid January this year. Since then, bug fixes and user testing was performed to get it ready to ship.

 

Thanks for clearing that up. And sorry for me being like this, it just annoyed me that you stated you worked on it for almost 2 years continuously.