PAX East 2013: IndieGameStand is like Teefury for indie games

“Tee today, gone tomorrow,” reads the tagline on Teefury, one of the more popular t-shirt websites on the web. The site, which offers dorky t-shirts with clever puns and references, only offers the shirts for 24 hours before tossing up another fresh, limited-edition tee. Clearly there are a lot of cool shirts out there if that’s a sustainable business model.

Indie games of quality are another commodity that can sometimes feel like they’re a dime a dozen. The smaller, low-budget games seem to arrive by the truckload, and even then, some of them are of noteworthy quality. How do you keep track of them all?

Enter IndieGameStand, which offers games like Doom & Destiny, McDroid, Leave Home, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, and more, for four days at a time. The model is pay-what-you-want, and the money goes to the developers with a portion donated to charity. Their system allows you to track the games, get updates, and you get codes for whatever platforms the game is available on, whether it’s Steam, Desura, or another service.

At their booth during PAX East, IndieGameStand had a spinning wheel that people could spin and win one of several indie games. Packed within the PAX Indie Megabooth, they had a line funneling into other booths and walkways when I visited. The site is a way for smaller developers to get noticed, gamers on budgets to find games, and it supports various charities on top of all that.

There are other services like this, for example Humble Bundle, but IndieGameStand has a unique gimmick and what they see as a more open platform. Humble has gotten quite large, so the types of games they offer have increased in notoriety as a result. IndieGameStand, on the other hand, has a much more lenient process. Their team plays a developer’s game, and as long as it’s good they’ll usually accept it.

For budding developers working on their first game, or someone with a game that was missed elsewhere, IndieGameStand marks another avenue to potential success and support of a good cause. The fact that a game owns the site for four solid days is a pretty good incentive as well. If you check out the past selection of games, you’ll see that it’s an impressive mix of noteworthy titles (Serious Sam, anyone?) and games that you may have only seen through channels like Xbox Live Indie Games.

For those on a tight gaming budget, IndieGameStand offers a way to play a variety of cheap games and feel good about it. Bookmark it. You might be surprised by what you find there.

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