Regardless of the numbers you pull out of your own site you have to keep in mind that no one else is going to push your company, products, and vision for you. While you may not get as many sales through your own website, having a web presence is key in establishing a name for yourself. Otherwise you are completely dependant upon others to push your name and product for you… and in my experience it is highly unlikely that any other company is going to go to bat for you unless you are offering them something in return.

A problem I have been seeing with portal sites like Real Arcade is that there is a real conflict of interest going on. Similar to the retail market, publishers will always push their games ahead of yours unless they think it is in their interest. Often they will even take a good game and duplicate it and re-market it in big ad spots while the original title remains hidden amongst the other games.

I am getting off the subject but I don’t see any way out of this mess really except for publishers getting out of the development business altogether and focusing on um… publishing. =) I am not holding my breath.

So anyway… I highly recommend keeping your own website. It is fairly inexpensive to maintain and should pay off over the long run in an established web presence (ie: people and search engines which recognize you and your products). Just don’t rely on your site to pay the bills for a while unless you are a master of web marketing.

Besides… since online distribution is based upon conversion rate the point is to get as many copies out there in as many different channels as possible, yah?

As for the portal thing… I have considered running one in the past also but it seems to me like a major distraction from game development unless you are partnering with people that can run that side of the business for you. Focus on your strengths.

-Unk

In the latter case, you probably have to really commit to that market and make a series of games, so that you can leverage the (small) customer base you reach for your first product, and turn it into a medium customer base for your next product, and so on. Pretty much all the successful niche players have been doing it for 5+ years, turning out roughly the same kind of product geared at the same audience, with new products every 3-12 months.

I guess it depends on what you want your business to be and where you want to spend your time. Each person will have their own answer to this. Building an audience on your website can be a time-consuming and expensive business. In your case, you are making casual games, so it makes a lot of sense that you would focus on making great games and then letting your distribution/publishing partners do the selling. You get less per sale, but as you stated volume is the key factor. You still retain your IP, so using distribution partners is not necessarily as evil as some in the indie game dev community would have you think.

And do you really want to be selling someone else’s games from your site? To what purpose? Do you plan on being a full-blown distribution channel? Or a publisher? Or both? I’m not looking for answers, per se, but just noting that those who are considering selling other people’s titles from their website need to answer these questions for themselves and consider the implications of their answers.

If you were selling a niche product that doesn’t really fit well into the existing game portals, then it’s obviously a tougher road. You might be able to get gaming press to pay attention, as they are always on the lookout for something to print. If it’s a good game, and gets good word-of-mouth, it might work out well regardless, but I would hazard an educated guess and say that in the long-run 99.9% of these games, no matter how good, will have a tough time making enough money for you to pay your bills.