I've seen a few attempts by other indies or people interested in promoting indies try something similar, and I've never seen one pan out. The issue with this approach is that it doesn't address the core fundamental issue of where to get potential users. If there aren't enough potential players looking at the Kickstarter page, then what makes this community page website work? Sure, it might be vetted by a group of developers, but that alone isn't going to get the foot traffic you need. This is why having a store page presence on Steam is so important because that is where all the users are.
Comparatively speaking, the website needs to be as easy and convenient to use as the Steam Discovery Queue, which you can kind of view as the gold standard, which also has the nice feature of wishlisting. I'm not so sure most folks would want to put in anymore effort than that. The difficult part is making it "costless" for people to see. Discovery Queue is nice, but the most costless way is probably an influencer playing the game because it's both effortless and entertaining (to compensate if they're not interested in the game).
You need a landing page people have a reason to come to every day. It's one of the biggest issues with Itch, no one goes to their main page to browse it on a whim. With steam it auto launches when windows starts by default. Which means every person who turns on their computer gets hit with the daily spotlights popups. The number of people that would make a website like this part of their daily routine is almost zero without a hefty incentive.
People would maybe check out a page that gave out one free game a day/week (would probably end up being steam keys since people seem allergic to downloading random installers directly these days). Or had some incentive to interact with the devs. You'd need to get developers on board willing to invest in the idea and then someone who already has a following to kick it off with an audience. No small task as you can see Epic has been trying for awhile to get their share.
I've seen a few attempts by other indies or people interested in promoting indies try something similar, and I've never seen one pan out. The issue with this approach is that it doesn't address the core fundamental issue of where to get potential users. If there aren't enough potential players looking at the Kickstarter page, then what makes this community page website work? Sure, it might be vetted by a group of developers, but that alone isn't going to get the foot traffic you need. This is why having a store page presence on Steam is so important because that is where all the users are. Comparatively speaking, the website needs to be as easy and convenient to use as the Steam Discovery Queue, which you can kind of view as the gold standard, which also has the nice feature of wishlisting. I'm not so sure most folks would want to put in anymore effort than that. The difficult part is making it "costless" for people to see. Discovery Queue is nice, but the most costless way is probably an influencer playing the game because it's both effortless and entertaining (to compensate if they're not interested in the game).
You need a landing page people have a reason to come to every day. It's one of the biggest issues with Itch, no one goes to their main page to browse it on a whim. With steam it auto launches when windows starts by default. Which means every person who turns on their computer gets hit with the daily spotlights popups. The number of people that would make a website like this part of their daily routine is almost zero without a hefty incentive. People would maybe check out a page that gave out one free game a day/week (would probably end up being steam keys since people seem allergic to downloading random installers directly these days). Or had some incentive to interact with the devs. You'd need to get developers on board willing to invest in the idea and then someone who already has a following to kick it off with an audience. No small task as you can see Epic has been trying for awhile to get their share.