Self-publishing the issues you face..

What issues/barriers do you think you might face regarding self-publishing? And I mean anything you can think of including advertising costs, web hosting, eCommerce and DRM investment.

Thanks.

The thing that I always worry about, is because I know what other games have influenced a particular project, I look at it and can only see those games. And I think, if its obvious that my game is a ripoff of game b, (for example), wont the original writer or producers of game b sue me.

Money, and lack of contacts. But money (or lack thereof) is the 'big one'.

distribution... lack of time.

Money, not only a lack of initial capital, but the need to hold onto it for a reasonable period of time in case of refund requests.

Money, and having something worth publishing.

The cost of advertising/marketing.

I'm thinking market penetration is probably going to be the biggest hurdle.

Next up is competition from existing companies.

You can get money from venture capitalists and/or banks.

this is good stuff, keep it coming - I can see a common thread developing already.

Dealing with ALL the net-related stuff needed to get a product out there. It seems I'd need a whole raft of additional skills and knowledge. My only interest is (or, at leat was) writing games, so the prospect of having to deal with all that other stuff fills me with dread. I find it all tiresome and dull, TBH.

well I overcome these challenges, but the pain in the arse for me was a) lots of emailing cavasing for work, then b) lots of contracts then c) having to make an ecommerce site and d) having to learn Armadillo and e) having to prepare wraps for the ports and f) making pad files and doing press releases. Probably there was some other stuff in there.

Money wasn't a major issue as all that only cost a couple of hundred quid which I recouped. However, time is money and all that took a LOT of time. Now it's done once though it would be much easier to do again. For example if someone wanted me to publish their game I could probably do it fairly easily but I wouldn't want to ;-)

<paste into this place what big10p has written>
I have finished my app a long time ago, but getting the whole thing to the point where it can actually be sold...HORROR!
Due to a minor error with my dsl I had nearly 6 months withouzt stable and fast connection. They took 5 minutes to fix it, but I was so angry and full of hatred I couldn't get myself motivated to do some parts of it offline. Now, I'm slowly seeing a light at the end of the tunnel and I hope it's not a train ;)

Btw did you know that share-it! now offers paypal too? That's cool, because I thought I would need to write a keygenerator for paypal too.

I hope my wife will want to to the marketing :)

Advertising, distribution/bandwidth, QA/testing... and if the game/app is sold on stores: printing (professional) box/jewel covers/cds/dvds/manuals.

I've had a game on sale at my site for years. Trouble is, nobody ever visits my site. So I'd say penetrating the market is my biggest hurdle. That, and finishing another title. :)

Yep. Getting noticed is by far the biggest hurdle (presuming you have a decent product).

I think it's fair to say that in the indie game development cycle (where the game takes only months to code) you need to invest another 50% of the development time on getting the product out there.

So what about post-sales support? Advertising? Community building? Newsletters etc..

I think it depends on which value discipline you chose to adopt. If you're going with customer intimacy, then post-sales support and community building should be your main focus. In which case community building would IMHO be best combined with your market penetration strategy.

Advertising is certainly a powerful tool, I'd say advertise on other community sites (like penny-arcade for instance who made popcap). However the most effective and cheapest form of advertising is word of mouth.

Newsletters I'd say are a thing of the past. If you have a strong community and an RSS feed, newsletters are superfluous.