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As Indie Retail Month in association with Gem continues, we take a look at Rice Digital as part of focus on the UK’s top indie innovators.
Rice Digital MD Geraint Evans tells MCV how the site is tackling a side of the market some still don’t know exists.
How did Rice Digital come about?
Late last year I started playing a lot of doujin games. I very closely with really hardcore fighting game fans – and those guys play a lot of games which simply aren’t on anyone’s radar. I was curious about them and immediately fell in love with what was on offer.
The more I investigated the more I realised that no one is really talking about these games, no one knows where to find them – outside very small enthusiast circles.
Have how you innovated?
For our clients and developers, we offer excellent editorial support for their games – from a team of experienced journalists. Most digital download portals take a game, put it on the site and leave it there. Job done. That’s not how we work.
Every game we have on our site will receive the individual level of love and attention it deserves – from PR work, support at events that we attend and access to our Social Network which takes in around 160, 000 gamers.
We pick games we genuinely like, want to write about, and actively share with our fans. Just to have a game languishing in a database somewhere waiting to be discovered by accident is absolutely the worst way to treat a niche game. That’s not acceptable.
For the consumer – there are two sides to Rice Digital. There’s the store that provides them with new, easily affordable Doujin and indie titles to play.
The other side of Rice is an editorial site. We cover all kinds of niche Japanese interests – from standard games reviews from staff, to niche features, previews, news and interviews.
