GoG Indie initiative

[getter77]

http://www.gog.com/indie

Games games games!

GOG.com, in our continued efforts to bring you all the best games in history for PC and Mac, is looking to make it easier for indie game devs to submit their game to GOG.com. To that end, we have launched a new portal on GOG.com today:

www.gog.com/indie

For those of you who are fans of GOG.com the service, this doesn't mean much of a change, except that we hope we will have ever more exciting indie games to release while we continue our schedule of regular awesome classics as well. For those of you who are developing games, though, we hope to make this a painless process where you can be sure that you will hear honest feedback from us about your game and where we want it on GOG.com.

We are also disclosing our revenue share--a 70/30 share, as is industry standard--unless we offer you an advance on your royalties, in which case it's a 60/40 share until we have recouped the cost of your advance. There's been some speculation on the part of developers in the past as to what it is that we offer indie devs, and we wanted to make sure that was clear up front. We've invited some of our indie dev friends to talk briefly about the experience of putting their game on GOG,com, and here's what they had to say:     http://www.youtube.com/embed/oqIc7vix2YU

So yeah, this seems to be a thing of much promise and perhaps a quite valid vector of attack alongside the likes of Steam's Greenlight or even the likes of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to an extent of sorts.  Devs here, commercial and otherwise, should take a crack at it and see what avails---perhaps pleasant surprises/great victories?   

[espectra]

I filled out the GoG-Indie online form for Voyage to Farland, but haven't heard back from them so I guess they aren't interested. 

A rep from GamersGate also contacted me soon after the game got on Desura. When I finally got a self-installer package built I mailed them but haven't gotten a response (other than a failed Skype-tag session).

Oh well, Desura is pretty cool -- I just wish more gamers would get on board. With their DRM-free stance and availability of "standalone" downloads (that don't require using the Desura client) it should be popular, I'd think.

[Samildanach]

Oh well, Desura is pretty cool -- I just wish more gamers would get on board. With their DRM-free stance and availability of "standalone" downloads (that don't require using the Desura client) it should be popular, I'd think.

Even the client is pretty good. I find it much less intrusive and less of a resource hog than Steam. Given the chance, I favour Desura first (as a consumer, not a developer. I don't even know what programming is).

[getter77]

I'd suspect GoG is currently flooded with inquiries, so I reckon giving them time is a salient move.  Alex Poysky over on GG is also a rather busy dude, but Twitter and/or Skype seems to work well enough in terms of grabbing some eyeballs.

Persistence!   

[espectra]

You may be right about GoG. They're either busy or they know that a Mystery Dungeon-ish roguelike won't sell enough to be worth the trouble.

About GG, it was Alex that contacted me, but the Skype session had me asking a couple of basic questions with no responses in 20/30 minutes. I was puzzled about the whole Skype idea anyway -- email is better for this sort of thing. Just bugs me that they were the ones who reached out to me first, not the other way around.

[espectra]

Oh well, Desura is pretty cool -- I just wish more gamers would get on board. With their DRM-free stance and availability of "standalone" downloads (that don't require using the Desura client) it should be popular, I'd think.

Even the client is pretty good. I find it much less intrusive and less of a resource hog than Steam. Given the chance, I favour Desura first (as a consumer, not a developer. I don't even know what programming is).

Desura is pretty solid. The standalone installer/archive requirement is an interesting "disruption" in the market, but the documentation is still catching up -- I'd seen a blog post about the requirement, but didn't know for sure I'd need to submit a standalone version of my game until I sent them an email asking about the approval delay. Perhaps with the recent Linden Lab purchase they'll be able to continue the innovation.