I have been considering XTremeGames Ltd( Andre LaMothe's company ) as a potential publisher/distributor of my future game projects. Does anyone have any experiance with this company? Any success or horror stories to tell? Cheers.

LaMothe is still paying attention to it? I thought he was all focused on that XGameStation or whatever. Anyway, this should really be in the Business of Game Development forum; any mods, want to move?

My fault - awfully sorry.

GameStation - Wasn't that a "Build'n'program-it-yourself" computer, for learning how make games completely from scratch?

Yeah, pretty much a DIY game console. XGameStation details. LaMothe is behind that as well. The games publishing of XTremeGames has moved to LaMothe's EGameZone, which is currently retooling (in order, apparently, to get those games on store shelves). If you really want to take this path, try developers@egamezone.net about it.

I don't think that anyone here has ever bothered to deal with LaMothe as a publisher, although I could be wrong.

Officially, I still have a contract with Xtreme Games for them to publish my 'Alien Territory' game.

I've not heard anything from them whatsoever in at least a year. The chap who liased with me - Keith Weatherby II - has since left, and so I don't even know the developer liason's name these days.

I've not had any money, of course. Last time I heard from them they told me they were "waiting for a distributor to pick it up."

As far as I can tell, LaMothe isn't a publisher - he's a go-between.

What he does is he licenses your games (in a games collection) and sells that on to a value-games publisher. You then receive a small amount of the royalty he gets.

Unless you cannot sell your title at all, you are of course not getting a good deal: you get a part of his royalty. And since the games are to be published in a collection CD, you get only part of that payment since you need to share with all the other authors.

Let's calculate that for fun:
9.99 for a collection CD, maybe 50 games.
Say LaMothe collects 30% royalty (could be a bit more or less, doesn't really matter) on 50% of the publisher profit (5 bucks).

So he gets 1.5 USD per CD sold, he will probably give you 25% of his royalty, but you need to split that with the 50-100 other guys who have their game on the CD. This can easily work out to well less than 1/2 cent per CD sold.

If you're a shareware developer, you decide.


HTH

Mark