Hello, my company has worked on an end user application (not necesarily a game, actually) for the last year, and our customer wants this pbuliished in other countries than his home country (where he has all the connections to the largest shop chains). What is the best way to get software into shops? Basically, we have the master CD and the customer will produce the physical goods himself (part of his business model). But how do we make shops offer them? I dont think it is practical to start running around through all the shops, or? Are there distributers that we could negotiate in? Target is Europe, btw - germany to be exact. Thanks for all information :-) Regards Thomas Tomiczek THONA Consulting Ltd. (Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

Assuming that you have done all the work to localise the product in German then you would contact local distributors in the hope that they will take on the product.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

Alot of stores charge a distrubution fee (some, not all) which is a pretty heafty price just to sell your product with them (Isnt EB and Best Buy around $15K+?)

Thats why publisher want so much from you!

Im sure local German shops are not like that, but for big retail chains you need to speak with them directly and see if they have a fee.

Ibuku
weaponstudios.com

Germany is different from the US in alot of ways and one of the big ones is they still have "small town merchants". You know how in the US all of the small town downtown shopping areas have been killed by Walmart, that hasn''t happened in Germany. Every little village has a thriving "marktplatz". (Ahh, the gertrankemarkt... racks and racks of Hefe...) True there are some large chain retailers, but the only ones I saw were supermarkets and they are not dominant. No BestBuys or Circuit Cities there.

So small businesses are king in Germany; I imagine this applies to computer shops as well. I never saw any computer or software stores when I lived there, (I lived near frankfurt and spent alot of time there) but there must be a few. I imagine you must have a salesman actually in germany to go around to the shops and get them to sell your stuff, just like the computer retail scene was like in the US about 15-20 years ago.

This cans possibly be. How are game publishers doing this?

I mean, dowe have to go through a publisher, paying him a small percentage (for NO work at all, as marketing and production are done on our end) just to get the "supply chain" organised?

Aren''t there distributors who can handle this?

Regards

Thomas Tomiczek
THONA Consulting Ltd.
(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

Have you tried asking your local computer store who their distributors are?

You may also be able to find the distributor''s names by checking magazine reviews for (especially foreign) products that were not yet on the market when the review was published. Such reviews sometimes mention who the product is distributed by or list a product info contact at the distributor.

When I visited Germany software was sold in both small dedicated software stores and large department stores. The German market is covered by distributors just like the US and the rest of Europe. In the games industry you have companies like Ubisoft and Avalon (and others) distributing games to the German stores.

I don''t know which distributors would handle your type of product but I know there are software distributors out there.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions

Hm - anyone has some names so I can look them up and try calling them?


Regards

Thomas Tomiczek
THONA Consulting Ltd.
(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)

Just found this post in the IGDA forums. May be something to check out.

Just as a side-note I have been able to track some distributors for our customers software and they will get demo cd''s the next days.

Thanks for pointing me into the right direction :-)


Regards

Thomas Tomiczek
THONA Consulting Ltd.
(Microsoft MVP C#/.NET)