What is GameJolt?
GameJolt is a kind of social network for game developers. They host tons of games and game jams. All around it seems to be a large, active, positive community. The site is quite old. I honestly have no idea how I went so long without hearing of them. You can see my profile here.
Why are you moving your games?
To get them more exposure and to monetize them. The $1.87 I’ve made from my blog so far isn’t exactly going to pay my mortgage. I’m also going to only make a few more direct Atari clones, before I move into more elaborate retro style games. To make money, I need players. To get players, I need to be better than games from 40 years ago. Pong is old enough to be my dad. It’s been cloned a million times and adding one more clone into that ocean of clones isn’t how I’ll get noticed.
GameJolt also has a nice API for achievements/high score/other goodies which I would like to integrate into my games. I’ll also add some direct social integration, rather than just post links to my game and hope for the best.
How will this effect readers?
It probably won’t. All the links will be changed in the near future. If you happened to bookmark any of my games directly, you’ll have to update the bookmark to point to GameJolt. The source code will remain in my github repository.
Overall I think this will be a positive move which increases exposure to my work. If I can stick it out and make a name for myself I can live the dream I had at 5 years old. To make a living making video games!