News - SlideDB

4 comments by Henley on Jan 3rd, 2013

Hey everyone just letting you know that I will be appearing for a few hours on the 1337LoungeLive show while they play through the new fan release of Street Fighter X Megaman mashup.

 
You can find more information over on the write up page here, so if you have ever wanted to pick my brain now is the time to do it.

18 comments by INtense! on Dec 18th, 2012

A few months ago David and I were interviewed by Richard Moss who was writing a piece for the new gaming website Polygon. The article is now posted and provides incredible insight into our 10+ year history of making gaming sites which includes ModDB, IndieDB, SlideDB, Desura and IndieRoyale. It was quite a shock to read the article at first because Richard was so easy to talk and laugh with - I must admit I didn't expect half of the stuff we discussed to be in it. But for the most part it all is, so it is an incredibly honest and detailed history of all the things we've done, decisions we've made and challenges we've faced over the past 10+ years trying to carve out a niche in the gaming community that we so love.

The article is entited DesuraNET's quest to make a better indie community and I encourage everyone to read it (it is quite a long read). Some of the key headlines included in the article are:

• The road to ModDB
• Success breeds more success
• Know your audience
• A place for indies
• An uncertain future

Thanks again Richard and Polygon for the opportunity to be featured on your site, it is a great honor.

41 comments by INtense! on Nov 14th, 2012

We've made quite a few changes to our commenting system in recent times, with one of the more major ones recently being deployed. For members this is the ability to view your commenting history, which should help you see the discussion you have participated in, and more importantly where you posted that comment. This we hope will allow you to find old images / mods / games you've posted on but forgotten about. For example here is my comment history.

A more radical change we are also experimenting with, is the ability for guests to comment. This we hope will lead to an increase in discussion on the site between developers and fans - because we believe the most important service we can provide is a way for you to get feedback when posting news, images and videos on the site. To stop spam and trolling, all guest comments are policed by you the members and guest comments are not shown until you have approved them. So everytime you vote a guest comment up or down, you are basically allowing (or disallowing) that person to comment - so use your power wisely. And please join in the discussion on all of the news flowing through ModDB, IndieDB and SlideDB - because nothing makes us happier than seeing developers share their hard work and having you discuss and critque it.

Finally some bad news. At the moment GameFront helps us mirror and host most of the files on the site. They recently changed their download policy, which prevents users from the following countries from downloading files:

• Argentina
• Mexico
• Chile
• Spain
• Thailand
• Poland
• Colombia
• Brazil
• France
• Venezuela
• Italy
• Peru
• Uruguay
• Malaysia
• Turkey
• Indonesia
• India
• Ecuador
• Costa Rica
• Honduras
• Hungary
• Philippines
• Portugal
• Romania
• Russian Federation
• Serbia
• Singapore
• Sweden
• Japan

The net effect of this has been our mirrors getting overloaded with requests and simply being unable to keep up with the demand. It is difficult for us to fix this, as providing another 2gigabit of bandwidth for downloads is quite expensive and requires significant architecture. We are in the process of adding more mirrors and investigating what we can do, but we encourage you to be patient when downloading, and remember that registered members are given priority access over guests on the site. So join today if you haven't already.

12 comments by INtense! on Oct 23rd, 2012

The biggest news for us was of course the launch of SlideDB.com however with it came a bunch of cool little updates which are worth mentioning now. Firstly a very much requested fix was the ability to upload videos from Youtube.com. That is now working again. New features are.

Stats filtered by site

Previously, when you viewed a games rank on say Desura, IndieDB or SlideDB it was competing against every other game, even the triple AAA's and non mobile titles. Now ranks are only split up site by site, which fixes up buttons as you can see below.

 

Games feed xml

For advanced users, we have a custom feed containing all games on Desura and their price (and sales price) in all currencies. If you run a site such as IsThereAnyDeal.com we recommend you use it to track specials.

Highest / lowest rated reviews

Now when we display reviews in profiles we also show the highest / lowest rated, so at a glace you can see what the fanboys / haters agree with the most.

Added bigger icons support

Finally, because we have finally started supporting mobile games officially - we needed to bump up the icon resolution to support app stores and their big app icons. So when adding or editing your game, you can now submit high res icons (i.e. 512x512) and our system will automatically resize them for use.

39 comments by INtense! on Oct 18th, 2012

Mobile gaming has been booming for years now with the end result being app stores filled with hundreds of thousands of games to play. Great for consumers however the downside is discoverability with app stores focusing on the "top XY", which even then typically only list games from developers who've already had great success and can afford big launch budgets and cross-promotion within their other games.

So what are your options once you've made a great mobile game? Word of mouth is ideal, but you need people playing first so you email all of the mobile gaming blogs of which there are a number of excellent ones. The challenge here is there are only so many hours in the day so the editors on these sites carefully pick and choose the few games they feature meaning no matter what you do there is no guarantee you'll get coverage and the attention you game needs.

This is where we hope Slide DB can assist, as our only requirement is a few minutes of your time - simply add your game to the site and begin sharing news, images, videos and other content and we will do our best to showcase it to our readers. While we are new to this space - we hope our "developer driven mobile games news site" approch will mean only the most dedicated developers post, leaving plenty of room and time for your game to be seen.

We've already had great success. ModDB.com and IndieDB.com were created for developers of mods and indie games and today put their creations in front of 200,000+ daily readers. With so many mobile games all completing for the few "top charts slots" - we hope to be able to help in a small way as there needs to be more ways to reach players interested in what you've made without being dependent on paid ads, reviews and befriending the right people.

If all goes to plan we intend on porting the site into app form - but are focusing on the web only at the moment. So please look around and share any suggestions you have with us and we look forward to playing your games!

Just to clarify, none of the content on SlideDB is scraped or paid for. It is all added by the developers - big / small everyone is equal.