Casual Games in Nintendo DS and WII

Nintendo DS and WII are bring in more casual games.
As compared to Playstation3 and Xbox, the two games console are targeting the major market of casual players.
This bolds well for small games developers.
We hope our website will be able to help more games developers sell their games as well too while waiting for people to discover their capabilities.

Gamerenkei debugging

Recently we are debugging and improving on our website.
We realised that there are many problems during the testing phase.
Some of the improvements that we have to keep in mind:
1. Interface for payment
2. Simple and logical steps to upload games + information
3. Interface of merhanise upload
4. Keep information simple yet sufficient
5. How to display all the modules yet within the page and at a glance
etc.

Capcom goes casual games

Capcom goes casual via hunt for sports games:"Japanese publisher/developer Capcom has revealed it wants to sign up sports games developed by independent studios in the West as part its bid to target the casual games space."
Casual games are playing more and more important part of the gaming industry.
WII has helped to emphasis the importance of causal games that target the majority of the world. Not the hardcore gamers but casual gamers.

Website Design Considerations

Website design always looked simple. After looking into many successful website, there are many micro details that plays a part in their success stories.
Our previous website layout looked simple and insufficient, therefore there is a need to revamp the whole website.
How to make an interesting and complicated website look simple to use? What attracts the users first is not the complexity and strong capabilities of the website. Mainly is the appearance, simple interface and human touch in short.

Website Meaning: Start from the explanation of website: eg Flickr, there is no full page explanation of the website, instead just 4 keys phases;
a)Share & Keep in touch
b)Upload and Organise
c)Crop fix edit
d)Explore.

Sign up: Simple, catching but friendly sign up picture is important. How to attract user to sign up? Short time process, value added propositions for users etc. For eg. Tumblr, Sign up in 10 seconds. This implies short sign up process, thereby attract the masses.
There are many details which requires our attention to improve on our website.

BandMerch: An almost GameRenkei equivalent for music

BandMerch is an online store that sells merchandise for bands. This is another venue for independent bands have the option to monetise their music beyond pure sales. Personally, I think the concept is great. Of course, it will be better if it can do something like what we are doing: allowing fans to create and upload their hand-crafted merchandise.

Nevertheless, BandMerch is an assurance to us that the merchandise model is good bet to go into. We feel confident having a place to let fans do their things for the games they love is going to enhance the developer-gamer relationship.

On a related note, I also came across an old Wired article that talks about letting fans create logos for their bands. This is way cool and something for us to consider as we continue to develop our platform.