Overview of 2018 - IDev

Posted: 2018-12-30 13:44:45 | Posted by iDev | idevgames.co.uk

It's been an exciting year and like I did last year in 2017's overview I'm going to reflect in what we have achieved, what changes have been made and the overall numbers for this year. You can look back at last years to see how the numbers compare.

I want to start off by saying that this is our first year out of beta and more importantly our second full year in total. I left off saying in 2017's overview that this didn't mean the end of updates due to the site being out of beta. Which has been very true as so much of the site has now been rewritten, built upon and polished. Which became my main focus through 2018. I've focused heavily on security and speed. Which has prepared the site for future growth.

That being said I have added many new features. Such as notifications, keywords, tags and scoreboards to name a few. Otherwise I have been focusing my time on marketing and search engine optimizations. I've spoke about this in a few posts over the year so I won't focus on this but I would just like to mention that I feel the site is optimized well now and so we have to now give it time for us to naturally gain more links to the site from other sites.

Unfortunately, it's not all positive. I've not talked about this at all but it's time to mention it. The site has grown due to a few sources in particular. Twitter has been our main source then facebook while also gaining a lot of players through stumbleupon. Stumbleupon earlier this year closed their site to move to a new platform that doesn't work in the same way. It then got worse, facebook changed their policys and stopped the ability to auto post to pages. Which it was setup to post anything posted to twitter. Which was also a great source of players. Twitter then followed suit and did the same, ending our auto feed of games to twitter. Which has hit us hard.

Though on the positive side we are growing naturally from the work we have already put in as a community. It makes sense that we need to focus on SEO now despite having huge established sites as competition, it will take us time. Also a big help has been our community talking about the site with friends, family and fans. I've had so many great things said to me by members of our community like how our ad network has helped developers to sell their first copy of their game or how the site has helped and motivated developers to carry on developing games. Although we have not become large enough yet I feel were on the right path to growing. We have been making a name for ourselves slowly but naturally, this isn't something we can just throw lots of money into advertising and expect to grow. We need to create a name for ourselves in the indie game developer and gamer community.

More importantly the markets have been changing this year. Not just for indie game developers but for AAA studios too. Since steam greenlight was closed the steam market has become very saturated, making it difficult for AAA Studios to compete with indies who also have access to the same game engines as the big studios which overall has made it a lot harder to get your game seen on steam. I've watched a lot of great looking games this year not do so well on steam because of this. Why is this important to us? Well simply it goes to show that what we are trying to do here is just what we need for the future. Instead of single indie games or small teams spending years and in a lot of cases spending a lot of money to develop a game that might flop on what are now saturated markets like steam is a big risk. I did just that and although I don't feel I did too badly out of it and during greenlight, it couldn't provide me a living. Maybe if I took the leap I could have made it work but I instead kept a full time job along side developing and releasing the game so I didn't have to struggle financially.

This all means that developers will be looking for more advertising opportunity's like we offer here, to help sell their games. While at the same time I can see a lot of developers, like us, wanting to build more manageable smaller games with the ability to earn money from them too.

Enough said, let's see the numbers!