Hi folks, I'm sure this is a FAQ, but I'd really appreciate any pointers to good, up-to-date resources on getting your game out there to the customer via the web. Our first indie title is nearing the end of development. We're maybe 95% of the way there, so there's probably only another 25% left to do ;) The dev team have worked on commercial titles before, but that was developing console titles within the safety of a mainstream independent developer. Now we are self-employed and targetting the PC, and we're entering completely unknown territory for the publishing side of it. We're aiming for download distribution, initially through self-hosting, but we're prepared to consider the services of all-in-one indie game portals or shareware hosting sites if initial sales are poor. So our initial concerns are: * Copy protection. Is it worth doing, and if so, what are good cheap solutions? * Payment processing. Particularly integrating payment processing with secure downloads. Who's good for this? Does anyone provide a sort of service that would let us fingerprint the downloadable executables with the purchaser's name, as a form of non-annoying copy protection? sloperama.com looks like a good resource, but from a quick scan of it I couldn't see much that directly addressed this specific sort of question (and it seems a wee bit out-of-date -- eg regshare.com is defunct). I'd be grateful for any advice, but particularly looking for advice from folk who have brought games to market in this way.

Quote:

Original post by bambuti regshare.com is defunct).

OK, thanks. I'll delete that.
But yes, the FAQ doesn't purport to give all the ins and outs of how to self-publish - it's an overview of the usual publishing options, for those who haven't done their research as far and well as you have.

Quote:

Original post by tsloper Quote: Original post by bambuti regshare.com is defunct). OK, thanks. I'll delete that. But yes, the FAQ doesn't purport to give all the ins and outs of how to self-publish - it's an overview of the usual publishing options, for those who haven't done their research as far and well as you have.

My bad. I thought you were talking about FAQ 60 (the publishing FAQ). I found the regshare mention in FAQ 16 (the indy FAQ) and have now deleted it.

Quote:

Original post by tsloper Quote: Original post by bambuti regshare.com is defunct). OK, thanks. I'll delete that. But yes, the FAQ doesn't purport to give all the ins and outs of how to self-publish - it's an overview of the usual publishing options, for those who haven't done their research as far and well as you have.

Sorry, didn't mean it to come across as a criticism -- your website is really impressive! But I'm just after pointers for answers to these fairly specific questions, whereas your website by its nature addresses a very broad audience.