Marketing the game is really where the money comes from. Its not until after you start trying to market something that you realize how hard that is. Writing the game is potentially less than 50% of the monetary equation. It seems wrong at first until you realize that your game doesn't sell itself and that its a lot of work to get people playing it.
I think the solution is to just develop a very good game. If you're game's good enough a lot of the marketing will present itself. Another problem with the portals is that they just happen to control most of the gameplayer traffic out there and so they are pretty much stiff arming you into paying them to put your game on their portal. However at the end of the day it pays off big time for a developer because with non-exclusive agreements you'll still make more from your game. Here's a good blog from Andy Schatz about Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.
http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/44702/11528
He was only able to sell 344 copies of the game directly but between all of his outlets including retail apparently he pushed around 10,000. Basically, the game would have been a bust without other distributors.
I think the solution is to just develop a very good game. If you're game's good enough a lot of the marketing will present itself. Another problem with the portals is that they just happen to control most of the gameplayer traffic out there and so they are pretty much stiff arming you into paying them to put your game on their portal. However at the end of the day it pays off big time for a developer because with non-exclusive agreements you'll still make more from your game. Here's a good blog from Andy Schatz about Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa.
http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/44702/11528
He was only able to sell 344 copies of the game directly but between all of his outlets including retail apparently he pushed around 10,000. Basically, the game would have been a bust without other distributors.