Sunless Skies dev Failbetter Games is kicking off a week-long event with the goal of celebrating indie games and their communities while also highlighting how reviews can be a massive help to developers.
For that inaugural Love Indies Week 2018 event, Failbetter has set up a document detailing how developers, players, and influencers can each participate in their own way and ultimately elevate indie games and developers.
The team notes that the event isn’t about trading swag for reviews, but rather encouraging players to support their favorite games and giving developers a chance to improve their own visibility and support one another.
From July 16 to July 20, Failbetter is encouraging devs to participate in the Love Indies Week by posting publicly about the event and hosting community-focused activities, contests, or giveaways throughout the week. The Google Doc mentioned before has a list of ideas for what developers can do to give back to their communities, and also offers guidance and resources for what kinds of tweets, posts, and activities developers can share as well.
“[We] were looking for a way to entice our (fantastic) community to leave more reviews on our games, in order to improve their visibility on stores and build customer trust by (hopefully!) boosting positive review percentages,” explains the dev. “We knew we had thousands of players who hadn’t left reviews but who might take a moment to do so if they felt they were part of something bigger, and something that would make a real difference for our team.”