Quote: "You're seriously going to have to work on your PR skills if you want to attract positive attention, and developers, to your site."
Personally, I am not turned off by bad "PR". I'm not some political asswipe like the many who lurk around the Internet, California, and places of business.
Consider my business plan "Internet bartering". It's not really stores, services, and ads that make the money, it's people who for whatever reason are willing to part with their money. As the old saying goes, a fool and his money are easily parted.
Quote: "Personally I think this would be great for you Fluff. Free games would bring people in, and once they're in you can show them other games; you could even make ad revenue if that's something you're interested in. Just because you would like to make money doing this doesn't mean freebies are a bad idea, quite the opposite. Your primary goal is not to extract money from people but to keep them coming back to check what new games or deals you have. Free games are a great lure for that."
That's a great idea, except what I am really worried about is the fact that most indie games are free. I mean, there are thousands, if not millions of games which I could download. Not all of them are finished or polished, but who am I to judge quality? The thing about commercial games is that someone actually benefits from somebody buying it. Nobody benefits from free games. Free games are poorly made, give you viruses, last 4 minutes, and the developers who spent months making them don't even get anything in return. A game which is made to be a commercial product is automatically a good game in my book. When I see a free game, the first thing I wonder is why the developer is not charging money for it.
Quote: "If you want to have a rankings list and are worried about free games hogging the spotlight you could always restrict it to purchased games or give free games their own list."
Some free games could be mixed in with the rest, but I'm not going to put them in a "top selling" list for obvious reasons. As long as the number of free games is less than the number of paid games, I'm happy.
Quote: "The name "Next-Gen Game Store" is very bad. Going by what you have said, and the games currently on there, the store is not catering to state-of-the-art games but low-budget indies."
Would you rather I called it "Low-Budget Game Store"? Ehh, I don't like what you're implying.
Quote: "You need to take the "about" and "legal" pages more seriously, people will only read these when they need explicit clarification, especially if they are concerned about something, so it is not the place for jokey language and vagueness."
The customer isn't always right. Since all the site is right now is a website, the legal stuff isn't really necessary. If they want to find out about the order process and all that, they can check with the payment gateway.
Quote: "You need to explain why you require contact details and address to make a purchase, and what you will and wont do with those details."
I don't owe anybody an explanation. I'm not going to get sued and then have a bunch of incriminating legal text. My payment gateway requires those fields. Once I've made enough sales, I can request that they remove the phone number field, but for whatever reason the address field has to stay. I think it has something to do with billing the credit card. By the way, I do get sent all of the information except for the credit card number.
Quote: "You need to explain what "estimated sales" means, and why you cannot track sales to completion. (Are you really unable to do this? I don't know how it works.)"
In order for the site to automatically get the sales numbers, it would have to interface directly with each and every payment gateway. So, I "estimate" by counting up the sales myself. I could be wrong, of course, but the sales figures are just to give a rough idea. After a certain point, I'll round and use numbers like 500+, etc.
Quote: "The layout is disjointed and pretty ugly at the moment. Again, take pointers from Desura, Steam and the rest."
I disagree.
