Those, who follow the birth of Feudums may wonder about our sometime hectic updating cycle of the articles. It is not all about us, our diligence or laziness. There is a quite strange filter between us and our fans, followers, you guys. The staff of IndieDB.
First of all IndieDB is quite OK. It offers a port on the web where people with similar interest can meet, see the news about the games, can share techniques, methods, ideas, opinions. Also a great option to start building your community, if you are one of the game developers, who want to find its players. But IndieDB is edited, and it means, they do not let us to decide how we want to present our games or even ourselves, but somebody behind the curtains will form the policy of who can go up and who will be let down. And it is anything but a fair process.
Being on the main page of IndieDB as one of the latest articles is a big thing. An article with this option can reach 1000 people easily. The same article published on SlideDB's main page, or being archived immediately - meaning you will never see it anywhere else, just on our article list, which is the same as if we put it into the bin directly - will bring in a few tens of people only.
Let see in details. We put up an article: Creating a map. It was a quite short article, a few paragraphs indeed, but it has a video about how the map editor is working. It has been published and stayed on the top of the articles' list on the IndieDB's home page. It immediately brought in hundreds of people, although the topic itself is not that interesting. Changing the element of the map... is not more than talking about, how we put lego blocks together to build a flat surface. But yes, it is spectacular... in a way.
Then we put up an article about the monetisation strategy of the game. If you ask me which article is the most important then this would be one of them. We were writing about how the game is going to work, what the players should pay for and why Feudums is genuinely free against other F2P titled games which is marketing bullshit most of the time. IndieDB did not give a chance to present our ideas properly, simply pushed the article to SlideDB with the explanation that Feudums is not a game, but an app and the content is not sexy enough, _there_is_no_video_ in it for example.
Well, IndieDB can decide what they put up onto their homepage. At the same time, if you think through, without a careful consideration of their own editorial principals (if there is any and it is not just the result of a more or less subjective decision process) IndieDB not just distorts the image of a game development and the presentation of the games, as they let through the sexy content and not the important ones, but also makes our game creator slice of life unbearable.
How should we present our articles in the future to make sure, we get the chance to reach and talk to you? Lets stuff the articles up with videos and animated gifs for the sake of the editors, even if these are not even slightly related with the content? May I ask after all, that they read the articles at all or just simply count the number of these media elements, then choose the fate of something they do not even understand?
We spent hours to produce the article, carefully considering the content, sometimes even the words, the presentation, the images, everything. May I ask whether the editor has spent at least 60 seconds to make the decision where it will be ending?
Feudums is a multi-platform game, where a big, strong server holds the game logic and the game clients working on different platforms talking back to it. These clients are going to sit on desktops, tablets and mobiles. So is it really an app my fellow players?
Every article has to go through this authorisation process and it is everything but an effective and fair process. The editors do not do a good job here and I can't realise what is the point of this at all.
IndieDB should change this process and start trust us, game developers more. I know the best what is an article and I am not a kid. I understand that pre-filtering the content might be necessary when the whole internet is on the other side of the dam, but after all the articles, content, game materials we put down the table, I do not understand why we need to be controlled in this way, why IndieDB do not trust us and why they persecute us with this. IndieDB in the present form is a not very comfortable incubator. Quite surely it will not be the home where a game can grow up, where a game can be launched from.
Lets hear us and change this unfair process!
