Banshee - I think you need to do some research into portals and what they are. When people talk about game publishing and portals they ARE NOT talking about download sites which, in my opinion, are not worth paying for. A portal is a site like Miniclip.com/ realarcade/ shockwave. A large site with millions of visitors that sells your game. These sites DO NOT charge you to distribute your game although they do take a slice of the sale price.
Also advertising freeware versus advertising shareware are very different things. People love free stuff but even the tiniest sniff of having to pay money will turn them off. I have experienced both, giving away free games is easy, once people know about it you get inundated with new links to you. With shareware you actually have to work, and unless you have a very good game a conversion ratio of 2% is highly unlikely. I would say closer to 0.5% is more realistic.
Anyway advertising freeware is, essentially, pointless. Unless you have some way of monetising the traffic the only thing you will gain is a large bandwidth bill (and a feeling of satisfaction which, admittedly, is rather nice).
Vorderman - you don't actually say what sort of publishing you want. I would suggest online which was mentioned above. From what I have heard (no experience here) the royalties from offline publishing are not worth the time and effort.
Based on what I have played of your game the portals won't touch it - it's just not casual enough. Although with some tweaking I think it could do very well. I'd go down the self publishing route and advertise in places related to your niche.
Also advertising freeware versus advertising shareware are very different things. People love free stuff but even the tiniest sniff of having to pay money will turn them off. I have experienced both, giving away free games is easy, once people know about it you get inundated with new links to you. With shareware you actually have to work, and unless you have a very good game a conversion ratio of 2% is highly unlikely. I would say closer to 0.5% is more realistic.
Anyway advertising freeware is, essentially, pointless. Unless you have some way of monetising the traffic the only thing you will gain is a large bandwidth bill (and a feeling of satisfaction which, admittedly, is rather nice).
Vorderman - you don't actually say what sort of publishing you want. I would suggest online which was mentioned above. From what I have heard (no experience here) the royalties from offline publishing are not worth the time and effort.
Based on what I have played of your game the portals won't touch it - it's just not casual enough. Although with some tweaking I think it could do very well. I'd go down the self publishing route and advertise in places related to your niche.