The mission·
We built this for indie game makers, because nobody else did.
Crewforge is a free place to host your project page, find collaborators, run playtests, and meet the people who want to play what you're making. Built by makers. Not optimised for anyone else.
I.The why
The gaming world isn't going in the direction of creativity. It's going in the direction of bigger maps.
We built this platform because as gamers and indie devs we felt the world is sliding toward bigger maps, more functionalities, more mini-games, more monetisation, and less soul. The dial reads scale in every direction, and almost nowhere reads craft.
That's not a complaint about AAA. Big studios are doing what their balance sheets ask them to do. The complaint is that the rest of the ecosystem, the part where the next weird, beautiful, opinionated game is being assembled by three friends in three different time zones, has nowhere central to live. It lives in Discord threads that disappear in two hours, in subreddits where collaboration posts decay into the noise, in Notion docs nobody updates.
The indie ecosystem suffers from two specific shortages: money, and organization. Most of what's broken can be traced to one of those two. We can't fix the money problem from a website. We can take a swing at the organization problem.
So we built one place where the project is the unit of value. Where a studio can post a role without being charged sixty to a hundred dollars for the privilege. Where a composer looking for their first credit can find one. Where a player can find the weird, beautiful, opinionated game three months before it ships and help drag it across the line.
II.The triangle
Three roles. Two shortages. One ecosystem.
The indie game world is a triangle. Players, makers, studios. Money and organization are supposed to flow between them. Mostly they don't. This is the picture we're trying to make legible.
- Maker
- Artist · audio · code · writer
- Player
- The audience
- Studio
- One to twenty people
III.The shape of the pain
Three audiences. Same pattern. Different details.
How many times have you seen an indie studio asking for collaborators on Discord or Reddit? As part of an indie studio myself, this is frustrating. Many other platforms ask you to pay sixty to a hundred dollars to post a job announcement. That is not a thing an indie studio can pay easily.
Roberto · founder · still building between jobs
How many times have you said: "I'd like to join an indie project in my free time, but I don't know where to find them"? Or, for people starting out while big AAA studios cut jobs, finding it almost impossible to find opportunities? And when you do find one, you have no safety net, no proper agreement for the rev-share that was proposed to you.
The maker side · artists, composers, devs, writers
We're a community of players. We love getting to know projects that bring innovation, creativity, new mechanics, and especially their soul and their craft. Unless you get found randomly on social, you don't have a place to find projects that match your taste, join playtests, give feedback, and eventually contribute to the studios you love.
The player side · fans, playtesters, patrons
IV.We integrate, we don't replace
We love the places you already live. We're not trying to replace them.
Crewforge is not here to replace Reddit, Discord, itch.io forums, r/INAT, or any of the communities indie devs already live in. Those communities are part of the ecosystem. We exist alongside them, bringing organization: a place to host the project page you keep linking to from Discord, a structured way for collaborators to find you outside threads that decay in hours.
V.What we'll never do
Negative commitments. Read them as the load-bearing part.
- N. 01Charge studios to post a role.Other platforms ask $60 to $100. That price kills indie projects before they start. We don't.
- N. 02Paywall community access.It's free because we love the gaming world. Not as a freemium funnel waiting to flip.
- N. 03Sound like a corporation.No LinkedIn voice. No recruiter spam. If a sentence could be on a billboard at a tech conference, we delete it.
- N. 04Chase growth for growth's sake.We're not optimising for bigger maps, more features, more money. We're optimising for the indie ecosystem.
- N. 05Run third-party ads.Ads break the "we do it for free because we love this" framing. We're not borrowing your attention to sell it to someone else.
- N. 06Sell your data.Already on the home FAQ. Repeated here because it deserves the repetition. Your data stays yours.
- N. 07Ship your work to AI training datasets.Your projects, devlogs, messages, and profile data stay on Crewforge. We block training-only crawlers at the edge. We allow citation crawlers so you can be found in AI search.
· The end of the page ·
i.We are indie.
ii.We are rebels.
iii.We are not corporate.
iv.We do it for free, because we love the gaming world.
Built by Roberto Sanginesi. Italian, in Barcelona. Plays too much, smokes too much, ships anyway.