From that first time someone gets to experience your game through your vision completed vision being shared with millions. So, if you are working on something now and want to get it in front of your most dedicated fans, lets talk about how Ludare can empower that.
There has to be something that makes you stand out in terms of experience or benefits to the player. At Ludare, our core focus has always been on making indie game development more sustainable.
It's become really clear in the last couple weeks how important it is for games and game platforms to compete on something other than price. Especially since there will always be another company or studio that has a bigger purse and willingness to sustain themselves long enough to take your market.
Ludare gives your game a home from the earliest moments that makes every single major event, planned or unplanned, a major boost forward for your studio and game without risking a publisher partnership. Reach out if you want to learn more about how Ludare can work for you and your game.
All things that are really hard to do as an indie without burning the opportunities that publishers want. Things like Steam Next Fest, influencer partnerships, or viral moments. These are hard to take advantage of without planning for it or risking taking one of those moments from publishers.
Coming back from DICE, the consensus seems to be that investment is moving slowly and more hesitantly. This means that if you are working on a new game right now, you need to be finding your audience, getting information, and have the resources to weather a due diligence process 3-4 times longer.
If you want access to a community focused on supporting early games in a way that can result in you getting the real money and data needed to make your game, check out the Ludare platform.
Ludare: www.ludaregames.com
Diesel Knights Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/die...
This is also on top of the dwindling potential backers and total backing dollars spent on the platform each year.
This is part of why we are building Ludare, a platform focused on building early community connections and getting the resources to develop your games without risking potential players.
For example, putting your game on Steam as a demo is unlikely to reach the average user unless you really get the ball rolling yourself for the algorithm to catch it and spread it. Even then, those demo plays are risk some sales or give your game a bad reputation if it’s not fully ready for players.
Diesel Knight’s Discord is almost as big as it’s backer list showing that a large amount of support for something like a Kickstarter is going to come from those most interested fans.
However, building this community is hard today and very few if any platforms are there to support you.
One of the most important is how much work on outreach and community building (AKA marketing) needs to be done before and after the campaign to make it successful at all, let alone half a million dollars successful.
I had someone share the Diesel Knights Kickstarter with me recently as an example of a highly successful indie Kickstarter. I think there are some key lessons that can be learned from their success that many people struggle to understand when they are looking to do their own crowdfunding campaigns.
2026 seems like it could be another big year for indies. So, make a resolution to try more indies games throughout the year. If you are looking for somewhere to find some of the most innovative, upcoming indies, check out our library at Ludare! www.ludaregames.com/Library
Wishing a happy holidays to all the indies out there. Take some time off of your project and relax before starting back up again in 2026.
If you want the same kinds of tools that make early access so valuable for Larian, check out Ludare and the integrated data analytics that we are building.
www.ludaregames.com
However, you have to make sure you have the systems in place to make it valuable. Either way, really excited to see what Larian has in store.
The fact that Larian is choosing to continue to do early access really highlights the importance of building in the real world with your community. It gives you a lot of information that you can't get otherwise in the most direct way.
So, we need to look at new solutions and data that can better show real sales potential. Things that are driven by player behavior and require a certain amount of work to do. On Ludare, we can expand your signals into play session details, progression, and net promoter score without extra work.
Not to mention that the early wishlists that get you attention and partners are the ones that covert the least. Wishlist generation is also testing a set of skills that typically would be taken on by publishers (marketing) or can be easily blitz scaled with enough capital.
Wishlists are an interesting quantity that studios and publishers have decided to build their decision making around. It is certainly the closest approximation to sales that is fairly universal in PC but it converts at such a low rate (1-5%) that it easily becomes more noise than signal.
Happy to announce my next game, A Baby CEO?!
You play as a nepo baby with good intentions who tries to bring childlike whimsy to a struggling book company!
store.steampowered.com/app/3965540/...
Congrats to Sandfall, Team Cherry, and all the other TGA winners. However, remember that what we saw at the awards doesn't represent even 1/1000 of the total games industry. The ones that will come to define the industry going forward are more likely found in someone's living room than at TGA.
Interesting data further highlighting that EA is your launch. Really highlighting the need for places where games can get support early without burning the all important initial release. newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/the-state-...
If you want to improve the quality of data you are able to build with, reach out. DMs are open!
The expensive nature of these other insights largely came from the lack of a general solution and the overhead to build your own. Ludare is taking that first step to build a comprehensive data suite for the metrics that matter most for making a game and drive confidence from partners.
Part of the reason developers and publishers rely on that one metric is because it's the easiest one to be collected (it's automatic once you release a Steam page) and is the closest to real sales data that can be collected without serious resources and investment.
But the only major metric most studios gather, analyze, and present to publishers is whishlists which don't really indicate the quality of the game as much as the teams ability to market it. Which is an entirely different skill set than that needed to make a game.
When we talk about analytics, there are a lot of good insights that can be pulled from comprehensive analysis and collection of data on who is playing, how often they play, and how long they play.
My Narrative Design Lessons bundle is now live!
You can get at least a book worth of ND foundations, dialogue design, and experimental tools. All come with a free lesson.
Been doing this 16 years. So happy to share.
itch.io/s/172588/nar...
#narrativedesign #gamedev #indiedev #gamewriting
Ludare is trying to build that new way through our low cost subscription and playtime based revenue sharing. If you are a developer making something new, or a player wanting to support new ideas, lets talk.
