Thumby Games Store / Publishing

[N-Dream]

Hi Thumby Team

Do you already have plans to create a store for Thumby games, where all developers can submit their games and players can download them from?

I think a centralized store will be vital for the success of Thumby. It should also be easier to use than the IDE, for Players that just want to browse games and click to install them without ever seeing code. You should also add a Menu item "Download Games" in the Thumby that gives you instructions on how to do it and maybe a display a QR code so you could browse it on mobile.

With AirConsole we have a lot of experience in creating a user friendly game store. If you are interested, I can give you a quick overview what we did in a video call.

Cheers,
-Andrin (Founder of AirConsole)

[TARMA]

This is a very good idea. A user friendly site for downloading games would be very nice or at least separate forum category with ready-to-play finished games (accepted by moderators), their descriptions and screenshots in each thread.

[lennevia]

We definitely want to implement a site or place with all the games that make games easily submittable. We will likely have a GitHub repo for submissions and have a webpage in addition for those that just want to download the games and not mess around too much with the code itself. For now, we internally have a spreadsheet until we implement the final solution.

In the past, we've just put together a webpage on our wiki site for Tiny Arcade & Pocket Arcade games: https://learn.tinycircuits.com/Kits/Tiny-Arcade-All-Games/

Whatever we decide, there will be links to these resources in the web IDE. Do those options sound good, or do you all have some input?

Best,
Réna

[TARMA]

We definitely want to implement a site or place with all the games that make games easily submittable. We will likely have a GitHub repo for submissions and have a webpage in addition for those that just want to download the games and not mess around too much with the code itself. For now, we internally have a spreadsheet until we implement the final solution.

In the past, we've just put together a webpage on our wiki site for Tiny Arcade & Pocket Arcade games: https://learn.tinycircuits.com/Kits/Tiny-Arcade-All-Games/

Whatever we decide, there will be links to these resources in the web IDE. Do those options sound good, or do you all have some input?

Best,
Réna

In my opinion this will be enough. The only thing to improve is - to make it easier to find for people who just want to play. For example, let's say I'm not a technical person and I just bought a Thumby (or received it as a gift), I tried all preinstalled games and now I want to try something new. The first thing that comes to my mind - I go to google and type "download Thumby games" or  just "Thumby" and if I don't see any thumby games as a first, second or third result - I will not continue my search. So, it would be nice to make "All Thumby games" page easier to find on google or at least include QR code (that leads to "All Thumby games") written on a small piece of paper with a Thumby. Or to do as N-Dream mentioned and add "More games" on Thumby's main menu with a QR. 

[N-Dream]

Yes, I have quite some more feedback 

I believe that Thumby's success can be greatly increased if you do not just consider Thumby as a cool tinker device for nerds like us that just want to code on this awesome device and be amazed.

To reach the next level of success, you have to position Thumby as a user product, not a tinker product. A product  for kids and retro-loving adults - that's a much bigger market and you have so much more potential reach.  And if you position Thumby as a user product, game developers will have the feeling that the games they develop will be played. And that's the main motivation for creating a game on Thumby, since there will be no other likely return on investment. So if you want to have lots of developers and games, make Thumby a user product.

Imagine Nintendo's Gameboy would be launched today and on it's main website you would get the feeling that it's a tinker product, and the main thing you would find is the IDE, the developer documentation and somewhere a github repository where you could download some games. It would only be a developer product with very little users and not a huge user product.

How to turn Thumby into a user product:

• On www.thumby.us, you need to prominently have a "browse games" section right on top that redirect to the Games Store
• The Game Store needs to feel like a Game Store, and not just a website that was quickly hacked together.
• Each game in the store should  a screenshot and 2 buttons: 'Install' and 'Play in browser' (which would start the emulator)
• The Game Store has to be also browseable on mobile: You will be surprised how many mobile users will play thumby games in the emulator on your website. This is great for user acquisition and selling more Thumbys!
• On the Thumby, you need to tell people that there are more downloadable games online, by adding a menu item "More games", you can use a QR code to the Game Store if it is scannable.

I also recommend you create a game dev contest, where you can win a Thumby Developer Edition / or some cash. We got hundreds of developers for AirConsole like this and some pretty cool small games. See our last contest: https://developers.airconsole.com/#!/dev_competition_2020.

There is a lot you can do, as I said, I'm happy to elaborate on a call if your team is interested.

A little bit of background about myself:
I'm the founder of AirConsole, a web based video game console that allows you to control games on your PC / TV using your smartphone as gamepads.
Because we use smartphones as gamepads, we had to create all our games ourselves and couldn't just reuse existing games out of the box (just like Thumby). By now we have a developer community of over 10'000 registered developers that have created over 180 high quality games for our platform (incl. ports from xbox, switch and PS4 games) and we have tens of millions of players.