UPDATE: Mission Statement

This might seem like a strange update, mission statement. However this is just an accumulation of about 2 months of work all for a greater change, the mission statement. Mission statement might not be the right words for it but more so our platform ethos. We've always had a ethos, the indie game platform developed by an indie game developer for indie game developers. That isn't changing but instead evolving and all due to one change, the iDev token economy for developers and players.

So, ever since I decided ads wasn't working for us. Years of only ever paying people who most likely cheated the system, while real developers earned nothing. That's not what I wanted, I wanted to support developers as much as possible. That was my goal. So I came up with the in game shop, direct to the developers and the platform doesn't take a cut. Which, I still think is a great addition to web games as a free baseline experience can be given instantly and extras sold on top like the full game. However, there's a caveat to this, a major one. Web games are traditionally much smaller and simpler by design, so 90% of games will never ever use the in game shop.

This is one of the main reasons the site hasn't progressed for 3 years. But the ad network never paid anyone properly, so why did it matter? Well, that's the thing, it symbolised one thing... Hope. It might not have paid people then but maybe one day it could. However the whole web game industry works like that, hoping that you'll earn something from ads when the majority, in reality, earns nothing. However, this becomes the tricky part. Ads aren't just a way to gain value from web games, it's one of the few ways to make money from the web in general. The other being directly taking money from the user however we're already doing that with the in game shop but that just doesn't work for smaller games. So then you have subscriptions but that's just taking money from the user. So that's it really, be paid for space on your site or sell things directly.

Anyway, long story short. I took a side quest over the past year (some serious R&D it turned out) and boom, I've found the 2026 model of giving everyone something. Not just developers but players too and the whole thing flips the model on it's head. Let's start with the negatives of Ads:

Now it's hard to believe but the iDev token economy flips all of that on it's head:

Now the last point... This one fits into the platform for indie web games perfectly. This is what indie games is about, making fun games and not having to try and compete with triple A studios. Sometimes the simplest games can be the funnest and finally they can earn something from their games in an environment that favors play time over total plays.

The other thing is, I might say how ever small the value you earn might be, you will hold (self custody) those tokens and will forever be yours until you do something with it. Now as the token is tied to the platform, the price could fluctuate. So this really builds on the hope factor ads gave us but instead of having $0, hoping one day you might have some, you could have a few $ that could become more or less in the future. It's also owning a bit of a stake of iDev Games success, in a way, because if we are successful with it I think we might have truly found one of the best indie aligning ways to do this. What appears to be perfect for indie web games in particular. That's what I find crazy about this because we are the only platform who was established enough to be able to switch to this in the way we have. The token is not meant to be the focus, it's the solution to the problem and I feel I've managed to integrate it to work like that.

I've also updated messaging (to make it more clear) and updated the privacy policy and terms and conditions to better reflect the new ethos and changes across the site. As well as just generally improving them as I don't think I had ever changed them.

So, back to the mission statement platform ethos part. Now you understand the above it'll be clear why this is now possible because of the iDev token economy and continues to evolve our ethos in a way just not possible otherwise. So the new ethos is "Free, ad‑free, privacy‑first. No downloads. No plugins. Just fun." As can be seen on the homepage but let's break this down to what this actually means. 

We've always been privacy aware, without a doubt that has always been important. But now we can make it a part of our actual goal. Again as explained above, we are a destination and not a middleman to the next site. So privacy here can matter even more. What I mean by privacy? Like tracking cookies and connections to external sites that can inject their own tracking cookies etc. So for instance, we've not used google analytics for like 5 years. We now have an internal stats, as per one of the recent updates and I'm also using cloudflare analytics now which is privacy aware (explained in our privacy policy). I have removed recaptcha v3 from the register form and have replace with cloudflare turnstile which again is also privacy aware too. I have removed the youtube embeds and replaced with a link to youtube instead. I've also removed the share this widget and created a bespoke widget instead. I have also removed all sites like google and youtube from the content security policy meaning the site will block anything from working which hasn't been specified cutting the connection from those sites.

The ethos line on the homepage doesn't explicitly say it anymore but we are still an indie game platform developed by an indie game developer for indie game developers. Focusing on the developer experience actually has a funny side effect. Game developers need players to play their games, meaning the player experience has to be spot on too. Luckily we have got ridden of the one thing players hate and that's ads. Players also like speed and easy accessibility and discovery. I feel we have great discovery and changes to the homepage such as the explore tags section I've done recently add to that. Or the hidden indie game pages. We also now have the speed we need. The site has now been full page cached by cloudflare. Every inner page is cached for 24 hours and the homepage for 30 mins. This does mean there's a little staleness to the pages but as soon as you log in you get a non cached version of the site. So think of it like this. When you're logged out you'll get a static html version, this doesn't load anything from the database or the server for that matter cloudflare actually serve it from different nodes world wide (as it is a global CDN). When you've logged in, everything comes from the server so it'll be slower too but fresh. However, our server was screaming before but now it's humming a long and is much faster for the logged in users. This is because most people and all bots are not logged in taking all the strain and stress from the server. What we do get though is full cdn cache for the game files for a year (as these don't ever change), including for logged in users. If you update the old folder is removed and a new one is created which means the first time you play that it'll cache and serve it from cloudflare instead. This is important because it means that the games are getting served as fast as possible to anyone world wide instead of everyone fetching the content from the UK based server.

Personally, I feel like this all aligns so well for making the best indie game platform for everyone. It's also quite funny because I did explore crypto when I first made dev coin. It's funny how these things so happen to turn out. Either way I'm very excited for the future, don't forget to check out the claim button (next to your dev coin) and test it out. All the work I've put in the past 3 months should pay off big time over the next year.

 

Thanks,

-iDev