DroidGamers News: Community Blog update, new feature for indie developers and a magazine?

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Published on Monday, 07 May 2012 13:30

So it is time for another update about what is going on behind the scenes here at DroidGamers. Since we like to consider ourselves one big happy family with our readers, we also like to get your thoughts on upcoming features, tell you want we are planning and, of course, announcing new stuff.

Aside from drinking copious amounts of caffeine, we have made a few changes to the site including a new feature for indie developers to use to gain a little more exposure. While we have a forum available for developers of any size to post a thread about their new games on, if visitors don't read the forums then it doesn't matter. While we do offer various advertising packages on a per month fee, a lot of indie developers are on a tight budget. This is why we are happy to announce the Indie Developer Advertising program.

The entire program is designed around giving indie Android game developers a chance to advertise on every page on DroidGamers while keeping within their budgets. Pricing ranges from $15 all the way up to $250 depending on the package you select and the size of ad. Right now there are two 150x150 slots and one 300x80 slot available. Everything is automated as well so you will be able to sign up as an advertiser, upload you banners, select your packages, pay for it via PayPal and begin advertising on here in less than 10 minutes. Custom packages are available as well, all you have to do is contact us at 702records [at] gmail [dot] com and let us know what you want.

This new Indie Developer Advertising program will be launching this week. We will announce when it is officially available so all you indie developers can sign up and get more exposure for your games while not breaking the bank.

Community Blogs have been taken down for right now. We decided to do this for a couple of reasons. The main reason being that we are giving the design an overhaul to make it better for registered users to post their own blogs and have a better layout. This will be a full blog system where you can even monetize your posts and earn some money through AdSense while being a part of the DroidGamers community. The community blogs should be back up by the end of the month.

Search function! It's been over a year since we had a site search function here at DroidGamers and now it is back and better than ever. Not only will it show you search results when looking for past articles here on DroidGamers, it will also show you a thumbnail of the title image and a short part of the intro text as well. That way you will know that the article you are looking for is actually the one you found instead of just guessing by clicking on search result links.

The forums. We are considering switching the forums over to vBulletin or a similar software. This just gives us as well as you, our readers, a much more solid forum software solution with plenty of options and features we can eventually implement.

The DroidGamers Game Store is also getting updated. The developer submission form for developers to use to submit their games to the store should be up this week. The big feature coming this update is that we will begin curating games from the Amazon App Store as well. This feature will be in its own section so as to keep those games separate from the Google Play games. A lot of people have requested an actual app for the store for their Android device. We are looking into that to see about the best possible way to go about it.

Lastly, we are considering starting up a Kickstarter project in order to get funding to develop a monthly digital publication. We have been talking to the fine folks over at Dialect Inc who are the fine folks that developed the nVision digital magazine for Tegra-based Android tablets. Before we even start up with it though we just wanted to gauge interest with whether or not people would want a monthly digital magazine. It would be an interactive magazine with videos, news from the past month, editorials and more.

To see if people are interested in this, we have set up a poll below for you to vote on. Also, if you have suggestions for what you would like to see in a monthly digital magazine from us, leave a comment below.

Update 8:08AM April 8th, 2012: Thanks for the suggestions in the comments below regarding the digital magazine. Taking the feedback into account, we would do a weekly digital magazine instead of a monthly one. Keep the votes coming in as well as the suggestions/feedback!

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