You mean like Rampant Games? They seem to be doing all right with non-exclusive online resale of other independent games alongside their own. The only thing I mislike about their setup is the total dearth of information about the actual game developers of the games they're selling. I understand the business logic, but I can't help feeling it is somehow contrary to the spirit of cooperational abundance to enrich one's brand equity entirely at the expense of one's partners. I think that's a big part of why so many indies avoid working with other online publishers, at least where the business relationship is necessarily an exclusive one.

Hopefully you buck that trend :-)

Quote: Original post by Muse
You mean like Rampant Games? They seem to be doing all right with non-exclusive online resale of other independent games alongside their own. The only thing I mislike about their setup is the total dearth of information about the actual game developers of the games they're selling. I understand the business logic, but I can't help feeling it is somehow contrary to the spirit of cooperational abundance to enrich one's brand equity entirely at the expense of one's partners. I think that's a big part of why so many indies avoid working with other online publishers, at least where the business relationship is necessarily an exclusive one.

Hopefully you buck that trend :-)

Wow... yeah... even with the big-shot publishers who own your company... they still put your company logo on the game as well as their own.

Mythic Blades on that website, no mention at all of Cartel Games. While I'm too lazy to look, I expect that the others are the same way. It's unfair, and Rampant Games should be ashamed. (Note to Rampant Games employees that may be reading this: slap your management until they see the error of their ways).

http://manifestogames.com/ ?

Basically, this already exists:

For hardcore gamers, as someone mentioned, Sony, MS, Valve and Garagegames already provide this kind of services.

For casual gamers, Real, BigFish, Oberon, TryMedia, Reflexive, PlayFirst, and a hundred more all provide excellent distribution services. Go look at BigFish for a pretty decent example of how online distribution can be done.

There are some value distributors that sell through brick-and-mortar, but the cost of production for those games are pretty damn high (compared to most games targetting online distribution).

There isn't much targetting the Linux market specifically (though some of the casual developers do support that market), mainly because they're pretty adverse to paying for content.

Entering this market as a 'publisher' (or a distributor) isn't that easy. Since there's an overhead for me as a developer with every distributor I deal with, I tend to focus my efforts where it's likely to make me a good return; which is mainly the big distributors, with sites backed by major advertising, and/or a connection to one of the big portals.

I'd also expect a 'publisher' to provide services above and beyond distribution, potentially including financing (like PlayFirst), QA (like Real) and Marketing (like Yahoo).

Good luck,
Allan