Getting your game on to the portals?

My game will be finished in approx 2-3 weeks and naturally I'd like to sell a few copies.

If I understand the process right I submit my game to "game portals" and they take a look and say yes/no etc?

Any tips and general advice on this process would be appreciated

Pretty much.



If your game is good enough and a portal sees potential to sell it, they'll want a contract detailing the specifics. they will either offer an exclusive contract (them being the only authorized reseller) or a non-exclusive one. Exclusive contracts tend to pay you more per copy sold, but means that you can't have similar deals with other portals to also sell it for you.

Payout percentages vary, but from what I've heard it's typical for them to take 70-80% or so of the revenue, with the remainder going to you.

Sounds like a bad deal, but keep in mind that they have the audience and marketing, and can put your game in front of hundreds of thousands of potentially interested people.

You may get 100% of the money if you sell it through your own site, but 100% of 3 sales is still a whole lot less than 25% of potentially thousands of sales.

also keep in mind that it will be at least several weeks before any game would make it onto the portal sites after they tell you they are interested. That's important to keep in mind if you have a seasonally oriented game: a halloween or christmas themed game can get a lot more sales if it is up on the portals before the actual holiday starts, because not many people look at buying christmas games in february...

Does anyone have a list of such portals?

The big ones:

Popcap.com
RealArcade.com
GameHouse.com
Reflexive.com
Pogo.com
Bigfishgames.com

There are many, many more, but most are smaller than these.

OK, it's very unlikely that if you submit midway through November that they'll look at it any time soon due to the Christmas rush.

But if I did submit it say early November and they accepted it, it'd be on for mid December?

Not necessarily. Most portals, I believe, work to a release schedule, which basically means that they only release so many games each month - particularly if it's an exclusive deal. If you've signed a non-exclusive deal, so that your game could be on other portals, then they may release earlier so as not to lose sales to another portal.

In any case, I doubt that there's many portals that will release a game within a month of accepting it. Especially as any game will need to go through some quality testing before release. Chances are you will need to make some changes anyway, even if it's to allow for the portal to add their own logos, loading screens, etc. RealArcade for one, is quite strict in this regard.

Real arcade are very unlikely to accept as they are ultra fussy, but it's worth I try just for experiencing the let down ;-)

Yeah basically it can take weeks before it goes live and at Christmas this is worse. Plus you gotta get all the contracts signed first and that takes ages. To be honest you are better aiming for a new year release date sometime.

Oh *%&@! - it's a seasonal based game. But.. I'll get it finished next week and see what happens. Worst case it'll have to gather dust til next year :(

Jake, What about your re-release of holiday bonus. Won't that suffer from delays?

I've already emailed people and got them to accept.