Improving the Discoverability of Indie Games by Leveraging their Similarity to Top-Selling Games Identifying Important Requirements of a Recommender System Quang N. Vu Cor-Paul Bezemer
[email protected] [email protected] Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data Analytics of Software, GAmes And Repository Data (ASGAARD) lab, University of Alberta (ASGAARD) lab, University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Edmonton, Alberta, Canada ABSTRACT Identifying Important Requirements of a Recommender System. In Inter- Indie games often lack visibility as compared to top-selling games national Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’21), Au- ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. due to their limited marketing budget and the fact that there are a gust 3–6, 2021, Montreal, Canada. https://doi.org/10.1145/0000000.0000000 large number of indie games. Players of top-selling games usually like certain types of games or certain game elements such as theme, gameplay, storyline. Therefore, indie games could leverage their shared game elements with top-selling games to get discovered. In 1 INTRODUCTION this paper, we propose an approach to improve the discoverability Indie games are games that are developed by a single developer of indie games by recommending similar indie games to gamers or a small team who are independent of publishers [51]. With a of top-selling games. We rst matched 2,830 itch.io indie games limited marketing budget and manpower, indie game developers to 326 top-selling Steam games. We then contacted the indie game often face diculty in getting their games known to gamers.