I have been selling games a LONG time now (twenty years!). My first game to ever sell a copy was called ‘asteroid miner’ (later renamed star miner). Because in 1998 selling games online was all very ‘new’ I just used the root directory of positech.co.uk to store the shareware .zip file for my game demo, together with images not even in a folder, called ‘image1.jpg’ and other such unscalable stupidity. There was a ‘hit counter’ to show how many people had visited the website. A single screenshot, I think even a banner ad for someone else?
Anyway… the site has had a bunch of redesigns over those twenty years. it now supports https and even has a mobile version of the main page! it scales how much data it displays based on your screen resolution. (omgz). It now looks way better than it ever has, and currently looks like this:
Which is fine, and I like it, but there is a definite lack of consistency from an aesthetic POV the minute you leave the front page. Each game got a website designed ‘at the time’ with whatever cool ideas I had, or whoever I had hired to do the design. They all link back to the main page, and some of them even have ‘other games by positech’ hacked manually into the bottom of the page like this:
That approach never scales, because its just showing fixed games to people regardless how many years later it is, or the genre, or anything like that. Frankly I don’t shift many copies of Planetary Defence these days, so why even mention it. The approach is static HMTL, and its dated. Theoretically what I need is some sort of database driven website that shows my games, and cross links them properly.
Its not like I’ve never done it before, showmethegames.com was a vague attempt at that (although it never gained any real traffic). I could in theory code such a system myself, but I don’t want to spend the time (I am 100% busy developing Production Line & producing Democracy 4). The only motivation I would have for doing it myself would be that I HATE working with CSS/HTML code written by others, which is normally some over-templated bloated mess with at least 50x the code required to do the job.
So the question is…should I even be considering it? No doubt there are some great off-the-shelf products to build an online web store that would make it possible without a lot of hassle, but would I be losing the ‘feel’ of each individual games web page? Some of them have cool backgrounds, or videos surrounded by excellent artwork. Do I really want to reduce them all to the bland consistency of a steam store page style layout just for the sake of my own OCD and obsession with order?
Normally I would say no, but then i can’t help but think that steam, GoG etc all have standardised store pages, and nobody cares? Is the obsession with creating some sort of tailored ‘experience’ for visitors to your gaming website something that died out in the 1990s and we just are not accepting it yet. Its not like videos and lets plays and trailers are not a thing, do people really need a ‘shadowhand’ font on one page and the ‘democracy 3 CSS’ to give a different tone on a different game page?
I think there is an argument that the ‘big AAA studios’ who do this still are only doing it because its effectively 0.1% of their PR budget anyway, and they may as well cover all bases. In the end, isn’t a game really selling based on a screenshot, a short video, a review score, and the name?
The other way of looking at it, is what would be the upside? How many people buy big pharma direct from my website who don’t know we make production line, and would otherwise buy it right then (who would not have bought it at another point). Even if the number is 1% of total big pharma customers (and vice versa of course), is that really enough money to justify the cost and time to totally revamp the website?
I suspect, sadly it is not, and this may be relegated to a ‘wishlist’ thing. My own OCD and the fact that I think the current mishmash looks ‘amateurish’ are what is really driving me here, not any sort of business case. Its not like I’m looking for outside investors who may be put off by the aesthetics of my web page, and I really don’t care what people who are not customers think anyway.
Maybe I’ll reconsider it again sometime in 2029?