as a hard core gamer (as well as a game developer), i struggle with the same problem. day after day, year after year, i find myself playing the same titles over and over, because i cant find anything better.
for me, those games are a RPG, a sub sim, and a wargame: elder scrolls, silent hunter, and total war. there are things about each i dont like, but cant find anything better.
i also used to play city simulators, but simcity3 was a letdown, and the Caesar series is no more.
flight sims are another one i cant find anything good (and current).
carribean (a pirate rpg) has caught my eye, but looks like it ended up being shovelware (they didnt finish it, just shoveled it out the door). i was hoping i wouldn't have to make a pirate rpg, and could just buy and play one. i was hoping carribean would let me do that. but thats ok, last night i got my 100 animated skinned meshes onscreen at once test going, and got skinned mesh LOD going too. so that pirate rpg idea of mine with 100+ combatants in real time boarding action combat is no longer a dream. i could build it today.
mech sims is another one. i was a big fan of the metaltech battledrome series by dynamix (not mechwarrior, the other guys. mechwarrior was the action game, battledrome was the hard core sim).
or anything to replace red barrron II. or x wing, or tie fighter, or falcon 4.0 gold edition. the list goes on and on.
some games i have taken a hard look at: mount and blade: warband - i'll probably give this a try. GTA4 - something different, never actually played GTA myself, though all my friends do. but DRM for PC version from steam is an issue, so i passed on that.
sometimes i'll spend a whole evening looking for a new game , instead of playing skyrim yet again.
and the saddest part of all... look at what you find when you go look for a game. 90% of it is all the same crap.
So, if you are a gamer then how do you find out about cool indie games? Any favorite sites you use, or just word of mouth? What cool games have you discovered’?
search the web, and the usual online outlets. perhaps a little word or mouth, i've hard good things about witcher3, and the battlefield and uncharted series on consoles. i didn't have the heart to tell my console buddies that battlefield started out as a hard core mission based WW2 FPS. they just think its yet another cool cops and robbers title like GTA or Juarez.
as for what i've discovered, not much. first: cool is subjective - opinion, not fact. so one person's "cool" game might be next person's "stupid", "boring", "childish", "too easy" or "too hard" game.
right now, we're in a very "me too" time in the game market. low cost development tools and a plethora of devices to develop for leads to a lot of new entries into the field. unfortunately, most are just building yet-another-tower-defense game. someone made money on angry birds? me too! i want to do that too! let's make yet-another-angry-birds clone!
eventually, the uninspired copycats will realize they can't reproduce the fad success of angry birds (or tetris back in the day), and will stop flooding the market with clones. at the same time, original works with true merit will start to slowly rise to the top - stuff like minecraft, kerbal space program, etc. so its not all bad news. but like anything, you have to sift through 99.9% junk to get the 0.1% good stuff. and yes, i'd say its close a 1000 to 1 ratio of crap to quality titles out there right now.
If you are a developer then how and where do you promote your game?
in the past: free playable demos on bbs's and AOL. posting demo links to every game site you can. i've also gotten free tv coverage on the evening news and a top 10 DL on AOL, both of which are the type of PR you simply cannot buy.
this time around, i'll probably use the same basic marketing strategy. but the number of game sites (such as gamespot, ign, etc) has gone down, and the number of online game stores has gone up. not quite sure why, but i get a bad vibe from GOG and Steam and such. they will require serious thought before i decide to use them as marketing tool / channel.
and if it Is easy to increase your fanbase before launching or after release?
the idea is to create demand for the product that pulls it through the channel, not spend cubic dollars trying to push it though the channel. fanbase is at most perhaps an indirect indicator of how successful you are at this. probably its greatest value is as a source of info as to how well your design works in the field, and what changes need to be made in the next design-implement-deploy-fieldtest cycle.
