Anyone have experience about marketing indie games? I think simply creating a nice website with integrated shoping cart is the way to go… however I would love to hear more experienced indie gamers opinions. What do people think about trying to sell games through publishers? By the way my game is a casual game (puzzle-type).
Two things to consider regarding game sales – brand awareness and access to distribution channels.
The first implies that no one will buy your product unless they know about it. The most obvious way to let people know about it is to advertise. Only a small fraction of those aware of your product will actually want to buy it, though (depending on how targeted the marketing is).
Distribution channels dictate how people will get the product. One option is a lone web site with a do-it-yourself shopping cart. Consider how malls work, though. There are so many shops in a mall that people naturally go there to shop. That’s the sort of effect a publisher would have. They aggregate many different products and try to push them all out. Consider what happens when a publisher is able to put a game on the shelf at a store like Best Buy. That’s something an individual usually can’t do.
I’m leaving out a number of details, but the two factors above – brand awareness and access to distribution channels – are the biggest factors in selling a product.
Tom
Hopefully this isn’t taken as spam, but WidgetMonkeys hopes to help Unity developers distrbute their games. Maybe. We’re working on the details. But we have the brand recognition thing in spades by now (165,000 widget downloads to date). And cool t-shirts too! 
Great to hear that DaveyJJ, I hope to finish my first game before the end of 2006. Its a maze type of game with obstacle to avoid and goofy aliens to destroy. 
Ray
It would be cool to have another distribution option. Let us know if that comes to fruition.
165,000 widget downloads is very impressive. I have no way to measure my downloads but I’m sure that’s far more than I’ve gotten from entering all the various iDG contests. I’m guessing some of that is attributable to it being on Apple’s widget page? I’ve heard that getting on Apple’s pages increases traffic hugely, both for widgets and their regular games pages. Since Unity lets us build widgets that would seem like a no-brainer, and maybe I should do that for Pawns, but I think many games don’t naturally make good widgets.
What other things have you done to get 165,000 downloads? Did you bother with MacUpdate/VersionTracker/MacGameFiles? Press releases to Inside Mac Games? Would love to hear a little more, if you have the time.
I guess mentioning monkeys is always a big help too. 
We got to this point in a variety of ways. Yes, being on Apple’s website sure helped get the initial ball rolling. Remember, Ron and I created WidgetMonkey under the assumption that a few hundred people might find it fun. So it was an accidental thing in a way. And yes, making Apple’s site with all of our widgets certainly helped.
We’ve posted our widgets in all the usual places too … macgamefiles.com, macupdate.com, softpedia.com and a handful of others. PR to insidemacgames.com too, but also to major local and national media outlets. We were surprised to be in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail. We did a custom widget for Mac Creative magazine in the UK too and got some coverage there. We’ve had press in Europe, Japan and Australia so it all adds up to today … the original WidgetMonkey gets downloaded more than 4,000 times per month still. (We have an incredible ISP in Dreamhost.com where bandwidth isn’t too much of an issue. And since we’re web designers we’ve got a pretty decent site too )
No, I’d say many games don’t make good widgets, and many widgets don’t make good (fuller) games. Plus the fact that we’ve maybe received $25 worth of donations for 165,000 is both great and discouraging at the same time. It certainly won’t allow Ron or I to quit our fulltime jobs and concentrate on making all of the otehr cool ideas we have sketched out. Oh well.
So that’s about it. Feel free to ask us anything else.
Hey I would like to support your Indie Widget distrubution idea-If its still in your sights. What sort of filesize do you reckon a game like this should be?