Portals like Bigfish, RealGames, etc...they have quite a large category of games, and the games look very well made. Has anyone submitted a game to such a portal and had it rejected?
My first two games were rejected by all major portals (and most small ones). My other two appeared on a fair few of them, (BigFish, Reflexive etc) but I would have liked to appear in more places. I have to say that looking at the screen shot of your game I doubt you will be accepted on to that many of them, simply because your graphics look a little dated. And graphics seem to be pretty important to portals.
In my case, think deep meaningful thoughts about being poor. If your game has a fair conversion ratio then Download.com, free shareware sites, and a press releases should generate you some income. I think these small free sources made me just over $2000 over several months with Xeno Assault 2 and it had a below average CR. Other than that all you can do is wait till you've got traffic from search engines, but that could be years away
I moved this thread to the Indie Basics forum. If you want your game to be accepted by a lot of portals, it really can't be an afterthought. You need to design your theme, gameplay, and interface so that appeals to their audience. Especially if you want your game to stick out above the crowd (ie. the Top Ten). Likewise, it's not the end of the world if you're not accepted by portals (well maybe it is if you're doing a puzzle game). Nexic already mentioned some ways to generate income. Also there's the Mac market, which has a lot of good avenues of free distributions (such as Apple.com). Your CR is important though. If you have a decent CR you'll be able to make enough money on your own if you spend enough money on advertising/marketing. However, if you have a very poor converting game, you'll be lucky to see a couple sales a month. It's become cliché around here, but making a "good" game really is important. It gives you a lot of options.
We were unknown when our first game PegSweeper was rejected by everyone, for good reasons. We still were unknown when we launched Betty's Beer Bar, and a few portals accepted it, the biggest being Big Fish; it sold well, we kept enhancing it, so over the time other portals started asking for it. FaceIt was accepted by some portals (most notably Big Fish and Real Arcade), sold badly, it was quickly dropped. We're still relatively unknown, but all the portals we're working with shown interest in our new Wild West Wendy. Moral of the story... portals will accept a good game even if they never heard your name before. Having established contacts and some kind of track record helps, but it's no guarantee of anything. In the end, what matters is the quality and marketability of the game.
Every game I submitted to portals was accepted (my games Spin Around, Quizland and UBM). They sold badly (except ubm on reflexive maybe) and was quickly dropped. They still sell well enough (for my standards!) on my site.