Indie game developers are the heart and soul of the gaming industry, and without them, we wouldn’t have as much innovation as we currently have, and have been enjoying since Pong. With that said, indie game developers are always struggling to create their games because of various reasons, and this is a problem that we need to do our best to help solve.
One of these problems revolve around having financial and resource hurdles in regards to games quality assurance (QA), testing games to find general and critical bugs, gathering player feedback, and attaining market data. These can be obtained by either spending a lot of money, or sign a deal with a publisher where you may lose a lot of your potential revenue, IP rights, deal with creative restrictions and vision interferences, or lastly trying your luck in putting in a lot of labor and spend a decent chunk of money to build your user/fan-base and manage them early on. These are major hurdles that indie game developers would face during their journey of developing and releasing their first or future games, and it’s an issue that Stitch is trying to solve.
How is it trying to solve it? By using the power of incentives to obtain higher rates of general and quality feedback and bug submissions, where testers would be rewarded by developers with points for their effort, that they can exchange for premium games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, SUPERHOT, or any other triple-A or indie game that would be available, and they’d be attainable at relatively fast-pace.
There will be other beneficial use-cases for these points in the future, like utilizing them to decrease the price of games or exchanging them for actual money in the form of a cryptocurrency.
There’s also a ranking system that would help provide developers with the best testers available, which also act as another incentive for testers to up their testing game to reach a higher rank to obtain various potential perks such as priority access to tests, higher reward amount, decreased game prices, invitation to exclusive tests, better conversion rates for points to crypto, etc.
With our love for the indie gaming scene, there were two points we thought of early on when creating Stitch:
1. To create as much value and benefit to indie game developers, as low of a cost as possible.
2. To have a decent business model so we don’t go bankrupt and not have everyone lose the value and benefits of the platform. (The power of love for the indie gaming scene isn’t enough fuel to keep a business for it up and running, unfortunately)
With this in mind, the main value we provide indie game developers would be to have a large pool of playtesters ready to test their games to provide them with quality feedback and bug reports, at a much lower cost when compared to other available options in the gaming market, if not for free.
The side and future value would be to provide them with tools and services to conduct market research, localization, game validation, increased community engagement, and much more. The goal with Stitch is to take over the QA and game-testing industry by outsourcing the work to the target audience themselves for indie game developers, with results rivaling the best options that are currently available, if not better, at a much lower cost if not for free. Tilting the gaming industry to focus back on independent game developers.
