No matter how many previews, gut check and reviews you load up with, buying any game comes down to taking a risk with your hard-earned money. Mainstream games can tell you that they’re chock full of content by citing hours of playtime, DLC plans or multiplayer features. But indie games, either because of their smaller dev teams, lack of marketing/PR or the platforms they appear on, have a harder time of getting folks to open up their wallets.
Editor Mike Rose and his colleagues at IndieGames.com know this very well and they’ve come up with a plan to expose more gamers to popular, new and under-appreciated indie titles without Launching today, Indie Royale will offer a bundle of four games every two weeks for the low, low cost of $US1.99. But, there’s a twist to the recurring promotion, which is that the price of the bundle will go up as more people buy it.
The reason for the upward pricing arc, Rose says, was that they didn’t want to do pay-what-you-want. “Everybody’s doing it,” he offers, “and we wanted to do something a bit more exciting.” “We wanted to reward early adopters for supporting the games we’ll be putting out there,” Rose says. That ties into the main goal of Indie Royale, which is to create increased awareness for mainstream gamer audience of what indie games offer.
“The launch bundle offers a lot of variety-an adventure game, an arcade game and tower defense-and they’re all games that we love and think others will like, too.” For $US1.99, you’ll get the celebrated cyberpunk adventure Gemini Rue, tower defence/FPS hybrid Sanctum, Metroid-style shooter and winner of the Dream Build Play contest A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda and puzzle/racing mash-up Nimbus.
What’s more intriguing about the way that Indie Royale’s bundles will change in price is that there will be no ceiling as their popularity grows. So, the standard prices of the games in the initial Indie Royale bundle would be $US40 without the group discount but they could go for more than that.
Indie Royale launches today and will be offering new bundles every two weeks. If you can find an extra eight quarters twice a month, then you just might be playing the next indie smash before anyone else. And saving money to boot.
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