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dustinh
02-17-2005, 02:39 PM
Hi,

Just thought I'd introduce myself and say, this is probably the best game developer forum I've ever come across. I'm pleasantly surprised by the wealth of knowledge and maturity shown here by the posters. I can honestly say there's not a forum I've found in all my years that compares.

That being said, I'm working with a group that has designed some mobile games, the two I created didn't do well due to my bad judgment of producing them on a dying format (Mophun). However, another I'm working with has had some sucess in the mobile market. Now we're thinking about jumping into the PC and web game market a bit. I'll admit I've just begun studying this the past few days. But it looks like most sales come from websites, as well as portal sites which naturally take a percentage of the sales.

My question is... of the portals you've worked with, which have you profited the most from and have had good experience working with? What level of quality is expected from them? With Mophun the developer community was pretty good, but Mophun itself was a horrible portal, frequently late with payments (I've yet to receive one still, and it's been over a year), broken promises, slow updates to the game database, horrible marketing. I was curious to know if Realarcade and other big portal sites are better to work with? From what I've read and seen other than the big (and understandable) cut, things seem to flow well. But do you as developers see sales?

And naturally I"m going to be trying out some games over the next few weeks to get a better feel of the market, what are some of you folks favorite games? (No cheating and saying your own!) ;)

Thanks for taking the time to read my message! :)

- Dustin Hubbard
www.spookytornado.com

Bmc
02-17-2005, 02:54 PM
you should check out zuma, feeding frenzy, jewel quest, big kahuna reef, bejeweled 2, flip words, bookworm, magic inlay, super collapse 2 Those are some of the more popular games in the casual market(Real Arcade, Big Fish etc).

Ryan Clark
02-17-2005, 04:47 PM
Check out this thread for a list of everyone's favourite indie games:

http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=2050

Andy
02-17-2005, 05:04 PM
what are some of you folks favorite games?

I don't like to sound annoying Dustin but... Are you going to sell games here in forums to developers? ;)

You know the developers' preferences are a way too different than reqular public. Developers have played A LOT of games before and they are mostly looking for something wildely new, fresh and uncommon.

just my two cents...

James C. Smith
02-17-2005, 05:19 PM
of the portals you've worked with, which have you profited the most from and have had good experience working with?

Different games will have drastically different experience depending on the how much in sync with the game is with the type of games popular on that ports.. I have had some hit games that did well in the main stream "casual" market. Therefore, my list if portals that did well for me is just a list of the biggest portals out there.

RealAracde
GameHouse.com
Shockwave
MSN Gaming Zone
Yahoo Games
Pogo
AOL Games
Reflexive Arcade
Big Fish Game

(This is off the top of my head so I may have missed some big ones)

A great resource you should read is IGDA's whitepaper in Web and Downloadable Games. http://www.igda.org/online/papers.php They list the "big 7" portals in the 2004 paper. Of course, the market has changes since then and new players are emerging all the time. The 2005 paper will be available soon.

dustinh
02-17-2005, 06:50 PM
Thanks for the responses, every little bit of info will save me that much more time. Nah wasn't really looking to market towards developers, was just curious :) Though sometimes it's hard to think "okay... i'm designing this for 30+ year old women in this market" as opposed to others groups of gamers I have in the past. But it keeps it interesting!