When we launched the Indie Bandits website 5 years ago, we never imagined that we’d be where we are today.
Firstly, we just have to thank everybody who’s supported us (especially on Patreon) on this journey.
We wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near this long without the incredibly passionate community we’ve built during that time.
There are going to be some significant changes for the better in 2024 so we thought we’d quickly explain how we got to where we are today and why we’re making these changes.
How Indie Bandits Began
We started the site because it was infuriating how little exposure there was out there for indie games. Articles on the site included news and reviews of indie games, but we worked out quite quickly that this approach was neither sustainable nor effective, especially in a space where most voices are drowned out, especially the ones talking about indie games.
For the first year, we were fairly quiet. We slowly grew our social media channels and published articles on the website, but we were finding our feet and working out where we belonged in all of this.
We tried plenty of different approaches, but it was the community that shaped us. As our socials gained more followers and we had our ears closer to the ground and we began to see the problems that indie devs faced and realised this was our audience and the ones we could help the most.
Shifting to Celebrate Independent Game Development
It quickly became clear that the indie gaming community didn’t need another media outlet for just fans, it needed a different kind of support. Our community definitely included indie game fans, but it was mostly devs reaching out to us for help.
This led us to shift up our content schedule to showcase as many indie games as we could, using organic marketing and social media to give a boost to any dev who needed it.
After a couple of years of trying different things and finding our feet, we settled on our slogan: Celebrating Independent Games.
Everything we do has this as the ultimate goal and the more we celebrated independent games, the more the community grew.
We set up our request forms and got to work trying to get back to every dev that reached out and doing what we could to give their projects more exposure.
This worked for a while, but we started to become victims of our own success. The community is dozens of times larger than it was in the first couple of years but we’re still a small independent team with a small but passionate group of Patreon supporters funding us.
The Future Of Indie Bandits
The community’s grown too big for us to continue supporting it in the same way so we’re going to start celebrating independent games in more impactful and focused ways.
One way is through the Indie Bandits Marketing Lab, where we’ll be teaching independent devs about marketing, content creation, online visibility, and personal branding. This is our biggest project to date and while it’ll start with a limited number of devs, we’re hoping this is something we can scale.
On our site and socials, you’ll also see that our content will become more focused on helping indie devs. We’re moving away from showcasing games and instead will be looking to create engaging and useful content that will make it so that devs don’t need us to feature or promote their games on our site or socials.
We’re interested in doing more collaborative content and also getting out into the real world and away from our computers so feel free to reach out to us on our socials with suggestions!
TL;DR
Basically, things are going well, but to ensure that Indie Bandits has a future, things are changing to make things more manageable.
What We’ll Keep Doing
- Celebrate independent games through our website and social media.
- Helping indie devs, especially with marketing their games.
- Producing content for indie game developers and fans for our website and socials.
What We’ll Stop Doing
- Our regular content schedule that included Indie Bandits Demo Disc, Indies You May Have Missed, and Indie Kickstarter Watch.
What We’ll Start Doing
- Producing collaborative and focused content on indie games.
- Experiment with other content types and formats including interviews, social media content, opinion pieces, etc.
- Attend events in the real world to meet and interact with the wonderful indie devs in our community.
Here’s to a wonderful 2024 for all the indie game devs and thank you so much for your support so far!
Indie Bandits 