Plan for Clark Fagot

Flirtations with the dark side -- an indie trying to get noticed.

Six months later and I still feel like we are shipping and marketing ThinkTanks (our Tank Game). We have started work on a number of other projects, but we haven't jumped into full production on any of them yet (we have always been careful that way, we do a lot of prototyping to test out ideas before jumping into full production). Instead, most of our time has been spent on making new builds, marketing, and pick up contract work (in fact, I'm being flown down to San Diego for the weekend to do some work -- hopefully I'll get to hook up with some of my old
volleyball buddies while I'm there).

ThinkTanks is now on Shockwave, RealArcade, and Reflexive. It should soon be out on a few more portals too. It has sold very well on all these portals, and we've reached customers we probably never would have reached, but we sure are giving up a big piece of the pie just to get access to new people.

We have started to think about ways to reach out to more people and bring them in to play ThinkTanks and other games at GarageGames. I wanted to share one of our ideas on how to do that.

We have created an ActiveX control that downloads and runs ThinkTanks (it also uninstalls it when they are finished so that no trace of the program is left on the players machine except what is in the internet cache). We also developed a very small version of ThinkTanks that has minimal shell, no music, and only 1 misison. This comes in at just under 3 megs. So what we have here is a web version of ThinkTanks that gives the user the experience of playing ThinkTanks in their browser (even though they aren't really doing exactly that).

So, how to leverage this? What if we could get a bunch of smaller websites (or bigger if possible) to host the web version of ThinkTanks. We could host all the files and simply supply them with a button that links directly to the game as if it's running off their site. Why would webmasters want to do this? One reason is to generate traffic to their site and make it "stickier". But why not sweeten the pot with some ad revenue like the big boys do? So we have joined the Fastclick ad network in order to serve ads to the loading page. We also offer a no ad version for those that want to just make their site stickier(and if someone thinks they can do better by finding their own sponsors we are totally open to that too).

Check out what we have put together so far: www.bravetree.com/TT/webdemo/webmasters.html. If you have any suggestions or comments please pass them on to us (either here or via webdemo@bravetree.com). We are still working on buttons and banners, so if you have a particular style or design you'd like to see let us know and we might be able to meet your needs. If you have a website, big or small, that you would want to put the control on just send us an email at webdemo@bravetree.com.

So can an indie generate an audience using gorilla tactics like this? Time will tell...