GGE & TLD's: BFF!

I am a domain junkie. I've got 12 TLD's (top level domains) and seem to collect them faster than a Roddenberry era space captain collects Tribbles. Where do they come from? Why do they multiply? Beats me. In the meantime, I'm tending and feeding them as best I can. And there's nothing they're more hungry for than TRAFFIC.

As an indie game developer, you wear the hats of both development and post-development (marketing). If you create a game of substance, one you plan to market and promote and not just let idle as a prototype, a good way to promote the game is with a TLD. They're cheap, they give whomever (game reviewers, publishers, players) a one-stop location to find your game, and they reinforce game branding. But what to do once you have your TLD?

Previously, in my 1.0 world, my indie game TLD's pointed to subdirectories on my developer website. These were simple static pages that "did the job": they showed screenshots, offered a basic description, and had a download link. Good for utility and getting the job done. Bad for going beyond that and building any real community and traffic.

Enter GGE and the power of its 2.0 world. GGE game pages are instantly part of a dynamic and growing gamer (and developer) community. GGE game pages are each like a mini "blog" allowing players to comment on the game, formally review it, rate it, add it to a gamelist (which further embeds the game virally), and link to a GGE group where the game can be discussed, play sessions can be organized, etc. All that and the page itself can be "watched" as a feed. Dynamic, interactive, portable, community based. Brilliant.

In a 1.0 world you have to constantly connect to an FTP site containing the webpage source code for your game page to make updates. After a dozen times of going through this annoyance, you might not bother anymore. With GGE as your game page you can easily edit page content from any computer, making updates painless and accessible.

As a scout for games I am always searching for developers and games in Google. Anecdotally I am often finding hits for game or developers I am looking for under the greatgamesexperiment.com URL. There are a ton of sites linking to GGE, upping the site's pagerank. With regard to SEO, using GGE as your game's page should up your search engine ranking, and if it's linked to a TLD (granted via a forward and not actual DNS parking) that should up your ranking even more.

Best of all, page views for your game page within GGE ups your game's visibility from within the GGE ecosystem itself, so the more you can do to promote it externally - for example, by using GGE as your de facto game landing page - the better.

Here's a few tips for good modules to have on your game landing page:

- Foremost, have high quality screenshots, and an assortment of them.

- List game features in a module, such as whether it has online multiplayer capability.

- List awards in another module, such as download sites that have recognized or featured your game.

- List press and selected player reviews in seperate modules. I suggest seperating them out as press has more credibility than players, but both will be good to reinforce the message of your game.

- Create a GGE group for your game for players to discuss and share items, and link to it from your GGE game page.

- Create one or more videos for your game, upload them to YouTube, then link directly to them from right within GGE.

- Finally, don't forget to promote the fact that you have a download module, and that players can download and play your game RIGHT NOW.

For examples, my game studio site, http://www.redthumbgames.com/ links to both http://www.shelledgame.com/ and http://www.sploidz.com/, each of which were sub-pages on the Red Thumb site, both URL's of which now go directly to GGE. I plan to use GGE to host game pages for all future titles as well. The Shelled GGE page has been grossly updated, and now looks better than both my old static page and the GG Game Store page. Viva la GGE.

We'll see how using GGE for my TLD's shapes download numbers and traffic, but for the above reasons and more, GGE and TLD's are BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, a match made not in heaven but here at The Garage. Consider using GGE for your own game pages and TLD landing pages, and at the very least make sure your game is listed in GGE at all. We've got amazing tools for empowering indies, leverage them!!!

Josh