Who is better to publish a game with? Dexterity Software or Xtreme Games LLC Publishing? I''ve heard some nice things about Dexterity. But LLC looks good too. Please help!

My peronal opinion would be Dexterity by a wide margin. I have been repeatedly unimpressed with LaMothe and XGames.

Take care,
Bill

Depends on what you are looking for. Dexterity Software know their stuff when it comes to marketing games via the old shareware method. Nothing wrong with that but it limits your scope a bit to on-line sales only. However they are good at what they do so that aspect will be less represented with Xtreme Games LLC. Andre'' LaMothe will pitch your game to many publishers and then sees if anything sticks. Sounds a bit shaky maybe but just one hit and you can make more money then you could make with on-line sales. It''s both worth the risk so why not use both? ;-)

Actually, Xtreme is going for online sales mainly, soon. They''re opening a new site http://www.egamezone.net/ which should be working within the next few months. But yeah, up until this point it has been pretty bad for Xtreme. They got screwed with the Hasbro lawsuit, which is over now. Infogames bought Hasbro Interactive and settled with Xtreme. Another thing is eGames hasn''t turned a profit in a long time. Which is why Xtreme is moving away from physical distribution and to mostly online distribution.

Dexterity is good yes, but getting them to publish your game will be much harder. But if both want to publish your game, you can always sign a non-exclusive deal with both of them, which means you can sell your game to as many publishers as you want.

Ok, thanks. Yeh, the non-exclusive contruct would probably be the best choice for me.

quote: Original post by Xing Interactive
Depends on what you are looking for. Dexterity Software know their stuff when it comes to marketing games via the old shareware method. Nothing wrong with that but it limits your scope a bit to on-line sales only. However they are good at what they do so that aspect will be less represented with Xtreme Games LLC. Andre'' LaMothe will pitch your game to many publishers and then sees if anything sticks. Sounds a bit shaky maybe but just one hit and you can make more money then you could make with on-line sales. It''s both worth the risk so why not use both? ;-)

You made one mistake. Dexterity also do OEM deals with distributors and publishers read on the website of Dexterity and his replies in the forum.

>but just one hit and you can make more money then you could make with on-line sales

That isn''t true. A hit ...

I apologize if I wrote anything which wasn''t 100% accurate. Dexterity Software and Xtreme Games apparently start to look more like eachother now. The new info on the on-line venture Xtreme Games are starting was unknown to me until now so that''s a good development. I do know that Dexterity Software have a fine quality assurance policy for each product that is offered to them. Steve Pavlina only sells top notch shareware titles so if you manage to get him interested then you''ve got a good on-line publisher who could potentially set you up with a retail publisher too.

Please however understand that they have to go through exactly the same procedures as yourself in order to get your game accepted by a retail publisher. Of course Dexterity and Xtreme carry some weight in the industry but your game is still judged on its own merits. I suggest you ask each potential publisher exactly about what they can do for you. The phrase "we do a lot of OEM and retail publishing deals" is nice but are you doing any of those deals for me? If you ask then you should get an honest answer like "We will try our best to pitch your game to as many publishers as possible, but I can''t promise you anything". It''s a fair answer and you have to determine for yourself if it''s a fair deal to give up 50% of the amount you''d normally get if you made the deal yourself. They have the contacts and the means to quickly put together a sample pack. But if your game is really good, won''t it surface on its own? Think about that

Oh yes and one hit title in retail can make you a LOT more money then all on-line sales put together. Fact is however that some developers choose to focus on on-line sales only. It''s easy, controllable and cheap to maintain. But on the other hand what you make from it financially is usually a laughable amount (exceptions exist of course). Signing non-exclusive deals with multiple publishers is also not the way to go, except when you sell on-line only. Basically if you sign a non-exclusive with 10 publishers you basically say "My game is so poor that you can peddle it for a few bucks and we don''t expect you to really try to sell a lot because we''ve got 9 others doing the same you do. Why? Because we''re ignorant and do''n''t trust you to do a good job". Now anyone who thinks for a few seconds knows that the only way a publisher is going to give it 100% is when he knows the product is exclusive to him. You don''t get price wars with competitors under bidding eachother to get it into retail, you can justify marketing and P.R. expenses and you can charge a decent retail price.

Now place yourself in the position of a publisher. If you know that you have a non-exclusive on a really good game which could possibly be sold by 4 or 5 other publishers at the same time. Would you invest in marketing and promotion so these others can sell product based on your ads? Would you take a risk to get it into CompUSA ($20.000,- fee to list any product) or EB ($7.000,- worth of compulsory advertising fees)? I''d keep my wallet closed...

Just some food for thought