kuligs2 Thank you for sharing your opinion. I honestly share your views in many ways. I use a NAS for most of my local storage rather than options like dropbox or google drive. Plus my website is largely self hosted using more of an old school tech stack (learned from my father and his buddies who ran a development firm back in the 90s-00s).

However, although I understand your view point I believe that this is a cynical outlook. I am not a mega corpo with millions of dollars in outside interest at my back. I am just another human with passions and hobbies, I enjoy web development and I have loved video games all my life. In the past I dabbled in game development but its just not my forte, but I am still passionate about the gaming industry as a whole. Indie devs struggling with marketing has always been an issue its no secret, I just thought I would try my hand in trying to fix it. I made this waitlist because I would like to garner some interest so when I launch we can have both devs and gamers which is crucial for a community driven platform like this. You can't have devs without gamers and you can't have gamers without devs.

It's difficult for indie devs to do everything on their own: building the game, design the assests, manage social media, building your game page on distribution platforms, playtest, and reach out to influencers and journalists. The idea is that I can alleviate some of the issues I often see, like not having a web page for the game, creating press kits, sharing press kits on google drive (which I find weird), finding/contacting influencers, and selling even just a single copy.

I have put countless hours into research, community out reach, building media presence, and on top of that coding websites by hand. You will see a plethora of AI slop webpages but at the end of the day they really do look amateur-ish and cheap. Even though itch is great its a bit hard to navigate and its design choices are a bit outdated.

In the end I do really care about solving these problems and I will gladly answer any contact that comes my way via email or phone. Theres no guarantee this will take off but this is not simply some spur of the moment thought I randomly threw out there. I have already spent many hours and dollars creating, maintaining, and communicating to get this going and I don't plan on getting so easily discouraged. Good things always take time. If I succeed I hope I can make a difference, and if I fail at least I can say I did everything I could which is all I can ask of myself. Thank you for your time.

EDIT 1:
Just added the country code, I had it in the href but didn't think to add it in the actual text. Also no I am not Gabe from Valve, although I could imagine this is something he would do in his free time lmao.