The new digital sales platform indiespil.dk launches today with a specific focus on the indie scene, and with an increased attention on Danish indie games, to get the Danes to play more indie games in general and more Danish indie games in particular.

 

If you’ve never heard of indiespil.dk before, you are excused. It’s a brand new digital sales platform for games launching today, at midnight, and it’s also got a brand new angle on the business of selling games digitally. As the first platform ever, indiespil.dk is focusing on indie games, in particular Danish ones, and will have videos and descriptions all in Danish.

In a world where the sales of computer games is excessively international, thanks to the missing borders in the digital world, it increasingly rare to see sales platforms concentration on specific regions. Especially in regions as small as Denmark, where the population is also pretty much fluent in English, it may not seem an obvious choice why a new distribution platform would chose to focus on the local market and language.

 

But that is nonetheless what the indiespil.dk is doing, and according to founder Emil Frølund, there’s good sense in keeping the site in Danish and giving the Danish games on the service more attention. He tells Nordic Game Bits that they are assuming there is a potential market of 100.000 people for their new game sales platform.

“We’ve arrived at the 100.000 potential customers by looking at the different Danish gaming channels on YouTube, the number of subscribers they have, and then adding that up,” he explains. “That adds up to a little more than 650.000, and then we are assuming that some of those subscribers will be the same people, and some might not be interested in indie games.”

 

But Frølund also hopes that the new platform can help the Danes become more interested in indie games in general, and in the games produced in their own country.

Our aim is also to grow the indie genre to a bigger size here in Denmark. It’s pretty big already, because Danes already play a lot of computer games compared to the rest of the world when looking at the percentage of the total population. But there is plenty of room for the indie genre to get bigger here.

Indiespil.dk is also decidedly modern in it’s approach to presenting reviews and information about the games on its service. Observing the increasing popularity of video-based material about games, 10 of the 12 reviewers attached to the site will be producing video reviews with only two doing classic written reviews of the games on the service.

 

While Danish games will have special attention, the majority of the games will still be international titles. Frølund says that they have already secured deals with a number of indie games such as Deponia and Blackguards, as well as a number of lesser know titles. As the service sells both Steam keys and titles downloadable from their own service, games on the site are not required to be available on Steam.

However, there will always be a channel reserved for Danish games. “So no matter how succesfull the site will become, Danish developed games will always have a maximum of exposure and thus more sales,” Frølund tells Nordic Game Bits.

 

The reviews on the site will not be completely independent, though, as the creators of them are representing indiespil.dk – the same site, that is selling the product. But Frølund says, that the reviewers still have the right to give their honest opinion about the games, even if he admits, that the reviews are as much an explanation of features and gameplay, as they are evaluations of their quality.

According to Frølund, they also try and filter the games they make available on the site, so that they only accept games with good feedback from Steam, Desura, etc, thus somewhat eliminating a number of potential negative reviews.

 

With the official launch coming up this Sunday at noon (March 1st), the proof will be in pudding soon enough for indiespil.dk. Is their assumptions about the space in the market for a local distributor focusing on local games correct? If they should prove correct, other small markets might be next.

Edit: This article has been edited to make it more clear, that international games will make up a majority of the games available on the service, and to include a paragraph clarifying the nature of the reviews on the site