Put your games on IndieCity
Sign Up Now For Launch! Already registered? Log in!

Welcome to IndieCity!

"We all know that there's a lot more to the world of gaming than is covered by the main stream sites of today, but right now trying to explore and play games off the beaten track is a tiring and fragmented experience. As a community-focused site, IndieCity is a games selling platform that allows ALL indie developers to promote, share and sell their games to an audience dedicated to indie gaming. By creating the one stop shop for all indie games and creating a personalised view for every individual, we aim to take the discovery and play of indie games to a whole new level."
- Chris Swan, Project Lead.

These are either the ramblings of a mad man or a great insight into where we're coming from and what's driving us to make IndieCity. Of course it might be a subtle combination of both!

IndieCity aims to have ALL indie games; by that we mean that we want Game Jam games and big indie titles from established indie devs. We want games that question whether they are games or whether they are art.

Why do we want this? Well, we ourselves are indie gamers and it's a heck of a lot of work at the moment to find indie games. We want to offer the indie gamer every type of title out there that fits under the umbrella 'indie game' and then use lots of cool filtering to show the ones that are most appropriate for each person's individual tastes.

Download Client

Summary — Peer-to-peer client. Automatic Patching. Recommendation engine based demo pushing.

As IndieCity wants to be the 'one stop shop' for all things indie gaming, we really had a big problem when it came to free games and demos; the bandwidth charges coupled with our generous revenue share could sink us fairly quickly. One solution that we'd earlier dismissed was the use of a peer-to-peer sharing protocol, but after further discussion with our community members it seems like it will solve a lot of the issues we had with bandwidth and also allow us to host free games/demos with little worry.

It's not just about reducing our hosting costs to give you guys that great revenue share, there's a massive value add to this too. We'll be linking the recommendation engine into the client to aid discovery of new titles, which is a huge bonus for developers and gamers. The system will download demos for gamers based on data from the recommendation engine; popular with friends, highly rated in a genre you like, similar to a game you've played etc. This should be a huge reduction in friction and mean that many, many more copies of your games are played. As well as being able to push demos to the user, the client will also be able to automatically patch your installed games.

Great Revenue Share

Summary — 85% with IndieCity integration, 75% without.

You'll get 85% of the revenue if you integrate with the ICELib achievements, 75% if you don't*.

We believe that the more developers integrating with our achievements and leaderboards, the more returning gamers we'll get, allowing us to take a lower revenue share.

We haven't permanently carved this figure in stone; assuming that our hosting costs continue to fall and we keep increasing the number of paying gamers, then we'll be looking to lower our percentage ever further over time.

* Less card processing fees

ICELib SDK

Summary — Modular libraries. Achievements & Leaderboards.

The ICELib (IndieCity Enhanced Libraries) SDK is an acronym you'll see a lot on IndieCity. The ICELib is the system that developers use to integrate games with the various IndieCity systems. At the moment these systems consist of:

  • Login module: This allows the user to login to the server, this is needed to authenticate the user to unlock achievements and pass leaderboard data.
  • Leaderboard module: This allows the developer to access the leaderboard functionality of IndieCity from their game, calling tables, updating scores etc.
  • Achievement module: This allows the developer to access the achievement functionality of IndieCity from their game, pulling achievement data from the server, checking achievements and unlocking them for the player.
  • Plus we have many more features planned for development.

IndieCity Underground

Summary — Alpha/Beta Testing. Community building. Pay-to-finish.

Fragmentation and fighting against obscurity are common themes in the indie scene. For a lone indie dev who just wants to make a cool new game it can be daunting/frustrating/time consuming(delete as appropriate*) to set up a decent website and start building up a name for yourself. This is something we've been wanting to address on IndieCity for a while now, and we also wanted to try and find a way of increasing our flexibility when it comes to charging for games.

IndieCity Underground will be a place for people to discover upcoming games in their early stages and a place where developers can find testers, get feedback on their games, gain a following and also earn some money while they work to finish their projects.

You will have total freedom when it comes to charging for Alpha/Beta/full access. For example, you may wish to release an Alpha for free, charge for Beta, charge for the full release yet let Alpha/Beta testers get free updates.

Underground will also be a form of peer review process; once the developer changes a flag to say they'd be happy to put the game on IndieCity itself, then the latest version will require a certain amount of 'good' reviews from Underground users before it'll pass onto the main IndieCity site. Alternatively, if you want you can just leave it on Underground for ever more.

Developer Support

Summary — Useful guides. Powerful Analytics. Direct access to your fans.

We want IndieCity to be the home of all things indie gaming and we want to help and support developers as much as possible. IndieCity will be a platform where you can really connect with your fans, and you'll be able to use our analytics package to track and engage with your most active supporters.

We also have an active support forum where you can find advice while making your game or how to integrate it with IndieCity. Plus we also kick off initiaties such as the open source XBLIG to PC XNA helper libraries to further help devs.