This popped up in my feed and I wanted to talk about it, because the more I think about it, the more it rubs me the wrong way. Discoverability is a big problem for indies (and people who play indies), but I am extremely skeptical that this approach will help. Note that the Kickstarter never actually mentions indies as a focus.
First, forget the “experts,” we know they’re useless. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. The real issue to me hinges on the fact that they are hand-curating their own database of games. They currently have 3000 games (which took them five years to collect; MobyGames has 300,000), claim to add two more per day, and - this is key - this number includes all the way up to AAA games, as the video shows huge releases like Horizon: Zero Dawn and Elden Ring, plus indie darlings like Balatro and Don’t Starve that don’t need any more exposure.
On the one hand, I get why they are including games like these. They need well-known games to reliably seed their algorithm (because it’s still just an algorithm) before they can recommend things that you haven’t heard of. But like I said, everything in the database is manually selected and inserted by the Ludocene team. If they’re including big names like these, they will naturally be trying to cover as many as possible, which in turn means that those will be the priority to sift through, not random niche indies (actual niche, not gaming press niche). It would be pretty strange if they included Elden Ring but not Resident Evil, for example. You can also count on recency bias even among major releases. It might recommend you Baldur’s Gate III, but I doubt it will recommend Dark Sun: Shattered Lands, even though it’s available on Steam.
All of this means that discoverability is a) limited to games that Ludocene knows about and deems worthy of inclusion, and b) is already going to be heavily slanted towards the big names that you already know about.
In other words, they’re just another general curator. Do we really need that?
On the other hand, let’s say hypothetically that they pulled their data from e.g. MobyGames (I don’t know how feasible it is to build a recommendation engine from that data, but let’s just go with it for a moment). It’s ultimately still just a “more like this” algorithm. Steam and Itch already have that, so what makes this one any better? I talked about Debug magazine in another thread; they cover hundreds of indies every year without any AAA dross, and yet they still rarely show me anything I’m interested in. That’s how vast gaming is now. General-purpose curation is just doomed to be shallow, I think, because there’s just too much ground to cover.
It’s implied but not directly stated that the Family Gaming Database is their data source. This site offers the following mission statement:
Yeah… I don’t think so.
In the end, though, will I give it a try? Sure, probably, once it is open to the public. If they prove me wrong and show me some cool new games, that would be a good thing. I’m not going to throw any money at them right now, though.