Game Portals eat 65% of the profit?

This seems a bit much. I would expect to recieve at least 75% of any revenues generated by a game I wrote. My expectations are a bit off it seems.

Are portals really keeping 65% of profits and do you think that's acceptable?

If they're doing all the marketing, hosting, sales, distribution and technical support, they aren't going to do it for maximum 25% of the profits and give the rest to you.

At the other extreme, you could do all of the above yourself and keep 100% of the profits. Personally I'd rather someone who knows what they're doing deal with that side of things at my expense.

Yeah Its not the best but thats how it is.

I dont agree with it myself and dont plan on using portals in the future.

Then again, they have the traffic comming in, and 35% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Indiepaths new project and press releases may be the best way forward perhaps?

* no experience with whatever portal, heck I never even made a game :P

But perhaps one could offer a single buyout fee for such a portal and then receive 100% of the revenues (or close to 100.. 90+ orso)?

These portals are basically game publishers. It reminds me of back in the Amiga days where the idea of getting someone to publish your game would mean you might only get royalties of about 10-20% anyway. The publisher does all the work of advertising and creating the merchandise and putting it in stores, etc. These days though, internet operations are much cheaper to do so I am quite surprised they are so greedy about it. I'm not sure what path I'd take but I don't think I'd want some company to be asking 65% just to put the game on their server and let people download it with a little bit of advertising.

If that's seriously all you think there is to it, then why not do it yourself?

35% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Bottom Line; They've got hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. Have you? When they've got something you want badly, they get to name the price and unless you've got something they want badly, you're gonna have to take it or leave it. If you've got something they want badly, negotiate. And be prepared to accept that they might not want it at any percentage. They reject some really great games. As a few people around here know.

Marketing the game is really where the money comes from. Its not until after you start trying to market something that you realize how hard that is. Writing the game is potentially less than 50% of the monetary equation. It seems wrong at first until you realize that your game doesn't sell itself and that its a lot of work to get people playing it.

I think the solution is to just develop a very good game. If you're game's good enough a lot of the marketing will present itself. Another problem with the portals is that they just happen to control most of the gameplayer traffic out there and so they are pretty much stiff arming you into paying them to put your game on their portal. However at the end of the day it pays off big time for a developer because with non-exclusive agreements you'll still make more from your game. Here's a good blog from Andy Schatz about Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.

http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/44702/11528

He was only able to sell 344 copies of the game directly but between all of his outlets including retail apparently he pushed around 10,000. Basically, the game would have been a bust without other distributors.

And i eat almost 99% of this tasteful cake in the kitchen next to me...

fraid so. But I still use them as I have no choice. I'll be self publishing AND using them for Max coverage. Someone once suggested self-publishing and getting max sales from that and THEN going on the portals...

A day will come when a website will be launched that will host your game, deliver, market to it's visitors and not charge the developer a penny. In fact I've heard that they'll probably reward the developer for working with them..

Someone said that day was Monday?

haha. Praise the lord.

I have no experience of portals but if they do their job properly, and have a large number of visitors, I don't see a problem with taking 65%. A long, long time ago when I signed a contract to have a speccy game published (retail, admittedly), I was offered 12.5%!

If 65% is extreme (and no comment from me), then if you shop arround some other portal will be cheaper (Less %). If there are not cheaper ones, then 65% is normal. Basicaly shop arround

If you get 35% that's pretty good for a major portal. Lesser portals may offer more but then you'll make far less sales. Think of your own site as a portal offering 100%, great, but how much traffic are you gonna get.

Think *real world* people. A 35% return is unheard of in most lines of business - have a chat with a retail outlet and see how many 2% they try and make!

Yep, most writers are especially unfairly treated!