This is how you should always sell your game, first and foremost. On the Internet.
Perfect! Offspring Fling, makes me think about the unreleased Ookibloks.
People are so great. They know walled garden are a problem. They give in for short term bucks, massive wet dreams and the socially rewarding “I’m making a game for iOS/XBLA, you know the iPhone/360?”.
There is Steam, too. Users can’t shut the fuck up about how it’s great (it is great, for them and me.user) but developers shouldn’t rush for it. Sell your game on your own, too. Keep control over your content. And please users, stop demanding to have all your games in Steam. For creativity, freedom of speech and other matters, you’ll need to move your ass, launch a browser and install a file. Sorry for the inconvenience, but I don’t want that big fat ass middleman in the middle of our relationship. If you can’t take the fact that a great game will not appear in your Steam folder, you need to seek help.
Developers have stars in their eyes thinking about the success of World of Goo on the iPad, forget that as 2DBoy said it, they have been crazy lucky to have their game featured at the right time (just before Christmas). People forget that the initial release of World of Goo made 25% of its revenues directly from their website. They forget that it’s through this release that people like me bought it, played it, and confirmed to Wii users and everybody else that this game was good and worth some bucks.
So it has a great effect: you can release whenever you want with nobody making you wait for anything. I can’t count how many developers complain about this issue on consoles. Second, you get all the money and people building momentum for you (again, as long as the game is good of course).
I know it’s harder and in our idiotic society, it seems lame to have a Paypal account and a web site. You don’t reach people the same way that iTunes or Xbox Live’s virality does but come on you greedy bastard, if in 2008 when Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr and others were pretty much inexistent 2DBoy earned a quarter of their revenue with NO marketing through their website, I bet you can make a lot more today. Ask Humble Bundle. Yes, they use another weakness in humans, the sale/impulse buy mechanic. But again, you might not need to make $1M in ten days. On a side note, I still haven’t played the vast majority of the two bundles I bought.
So just to say, if you think Nintendo channels and App store tubes or whatever are mean and that you are not free I say, you have choice. You are free with the Internet (at least for now). Don’t try to make platforms understand you. They are here to fuck you, it’s the meta-game. Make them scared. Make them understand that you don’t need them like a crackhead needs crack. Stop sucking their dicks. Make them suck yours.
By making a game they want so bad.