I was having a talk with a friend the other week about my freeware games site idea. I think what he was trying to tell me was (You'll have to forgive me if I got it wrong!) was something along the lines of:

"Even if you did manage to build the website the way you imagined it, what would make it different to the rest?"

Which, is actually a really good point. In truth, my site would be no different to all of the other freeware sites out there, although hopefully it would have more content, flexibility and user interaction then most of the other ones. So what do I have to do to make it different?

He suggested that I should create a website centred around a certain niche, such as freeware Mac games or freeware RPG games, based on the idea that people are more likely to follow, or contribute to, a site focused solely on an area that they care about. Which I agree with, but there isn't a niche in freeware games that I care about enough to make an entire website about. However, I did come up with a compromise that I feel could work.

Leveraging the 'Organic Groups' contributed module for Drupal, I could give multiple different niches their own complete area of the site - With their own look, content contributors, moderators, news blog (Including RSS feed), forum, games library and so on.

There could be groups for virtually anything, such as by Platform (Mac, Linux freeware etc) Genre (RPG, FPS etc) or theme (Horror, Anime etc). There could even be a group called something like 'Gold class' which would be reserved for discussion of the very best freeware titles, or perhaps one called 'Old classics' which would be dedicated to formerly commercial games that have become freeware.

Each area of the site would be semi-autonomous in that it would be controlled by people that aren't actually involved with the running of the overall site. However, blog posts into each group could be syndicated to the front page, as well as posted in more then one section, for instance a post on a Mac RPG could be posted into both 'Mac' and 'RPGs'. There would still be the big library of games, but it wouldn't be the primary focus, just a useful tool.

So, now I have a new target to shoot for, one that's much higher but one that I think may result in a much more interesting and useful site.

Any feedback? I am particularly interested in hearing about what kinds of niches you would be interested in following or contributing to.