Online Publisher Talks About Their Indie Games Contest

Terence from Zoo Games and 2Bee Games talked about their online games portal

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/2-bee-games-gdc-2010-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Terence: Hi, I’m Terence Lee. I’m an Associate Producer at Zoo Games and 2BeeGames.

Interviewer: And what is 2BeeGames about?

Terence: 2BeeGames is an online games portal where independent developers, students, anyone can upload their games to our site and share them with other people and play other people’s games. What we do is we publish the best games on our site to any platform.

Interviewer: Can you talk about how people are using it right now? Is it mostly students or indie developers uploading?

Terence: We’ve already had two contests and our first place winner is Auditorium which I’m got right here. I know you guys can’t see it, but it’s a Flash game and now we’re publishing it for, like, Xbox and Playstation.

Interviewer: Do you handle the porting and all that then, or is that something that…

Terence: Yes. Zoo Games is our main parent company, and they are a casual game publisher. So, they have all the resource and experience to get games onto different consoles.

Interviewer: What would you say is the benefit? Well, let’s talk about the contest. You have another contest running right now. Can you talk about the details of that, and what the prize is?

Terence: It hasn’t started yet, but we have a big contest coming up in April or March 1st, May 1st, sorry. People submit games to that contest, and the winner gets a $100,000 cash prize. And, if they want, a publishing contract to get their game onto any platform.

Interviewer: Can you talk about the benefits of using your service versus some of these other publishing services that indie developers can also use?

Terence: There’s not really much anything else that’s doing what we’re doing. There’s a lot of, like, game portals, but they don’t publish the games and they’re not very developer friendly. They’re always focused on people who are there to play the games. We want to focus on the developers to make it easy for them. And publishers, they normally are not looking for indie games, and they’re not looking for people who make game prototypes. We want to really reach out to them and get their games published.

Interviewer: Do you guys have, like, online forums or any kind of dev community on your site that folks can visit to just, you know, get feedback and stuff like that?

Terence: Yes. We’re relaunching our site right now. The new site will be up on April 1st, and at this moment we have a [?] set up. We’ve got a pretty solid development community. Once it’s up, we’ll have a lot of articles and, like, better, well known indie developers helping out the people at our site. So, we’re very developer focused.

Interviewer: And where can people find out more information about the contest and possibly the forum and stuff like that?

Terence: I mean, you can go to our website, 2BeeGames.com.

Interviewer: And that’s the number 2. So, it’s 2 and then B-E-E G-A-M-E-S.com.

Terence: Yes. You can go to our site. We are relaunching our site on April 1st. So, keep an eye on that. I’m sorry. You can put in your e-mail address and we’ll remind you when the new site is up.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.