Wait a sec, so on top of the money that Apple and MS take, GamePro is going to take another cut?

Here's what they list on their site:
- Publishing your games under the GamePro brand
- Is this a bonus?

- Regular promotion in GamePro Magazine
- Gee, that ensures no one else will cover your game

- A publisher account on GamePro.com, giving you exclusive developer community access and tools to promote your games
- I thought they said they do the promoting

- Management of all distribution relationships with Microsoft, Apple, and others who sell your games
- Relationships are key! And they want to take that away from the developer.

- A monthly check from GamePro for all units sold
- Apple, MS and Sony already give you money.

This is crazy. Why would anyone want to do this?

If you have a publisher, you are no longer independent. This is just another company trying to cash in on the indie wave.

Personally, I'm disappointed to see this posted up here.

Asking an independent game developer to sign up for a deal like this is like asking him to sell half his soul and eat the other half.

Not defending this exact example, mind, but I think it's fair to say that some indies might do better if they had someone helping with marketing in exchange for a cut of the royalties.

Of course, the question is, can the people you're partnering with do a better job at marketing than you yourselves can by connecting directly to the community? In this case, not so sure.

Yeah, as always it just comes down to "know what you're signing up for". If you are not sure, ask someone or get a lawyer!

Kind of the whole point of indie games is to cut out the middlemen and have the customer buy directly from the developer rather than parasitic intermediaries. The console owners are already intermediaries, so this is an intermediary with other intermediaries.

The values that publishers provide don't equal the 80%+ that they often take. Often they don't do any work at all besides acting as gatekeepers. They aren't even like mainstream game publishers who provide the funds to create a game, these type of publishers provide little but promises of access.

I estimate my marketing ability at zero, so this sort of thing might be something I would consider...if it weren't GamePro. How is it they stay in business when even the half-decent gaming mags fold?

Oh ffs you guys. quit with the whole self-righteous starving artist thing!

I guess if we make any money from people not on the white-list of self appointed "publishers" then we should no longer have our games linked to?

So that's a byebye from Braid, Cave Story Wii and all them others.

There's a difference between a partner and a publisher. When you get your game on XBLA, WiiWare, or Steam, they don't get the right to sell your game for every platform / console, just their specific platform. That's a big difference. They aren't even really "publishing" the game except to their particular audience, they aren't taking your rights to sell it on your own site or make deals with other people to sell it elsewhere. Whereas this GamePro thing (and the 2 Bees thing before it) are taking those rights, exclusively. The key distinction is "exclusive" -- exclusive publishers that own the right to sell the game completely on the one hand, and publishers for particular platforms (often platforms that they built) on the other hand. John Blow did not give over Braid to a single publisher and give them to exclusive rights to sell the game, he partnered with Microsoft and other companies to bring the game to their particular platforms.

Gamepro wants to be your middle-man, why let them?

If you have it in you to put together a good game, make the investment and publish it yourself. Just think: the guy who designed Pac Man didn't reap the financial rewards that Namco got for it. That was the old distribution system.

I guess if you have no business sense then this might be a good choice, but really, there are so many guides and postmortems about publishing a game on XBLA or PSN or wiiware that you can do your own research.

I think there's simply too many options for an indie game developer to go to gamepro and have them do it and share in your profits.

What indiedevs - no matter if game/book/something else - require nowadays, isn't a publisher but plain simply service providers which allow us to "selectively" outsource individual tasks. We dont need someone to sell out for anymore.

Adapt or continue doing what you do best: ripping of clueless people (both creators and consumers).

It's true. In this day and age, a lot of times you don't need publishers.

This (like 2Bee) is probably for developers who don't know how to convert and port games to other consoles. What we wanted to do is help devs who make small PC and Flash games bring it over to consoles. Also, rights are negotiated per platform.

At 2Bee, we would most likely have another development team convert (and enhance) any games we reach deals on with the original dev consulting. In those cases, the revenue share is free money to the original developer as they would not normally be doing this on their own.

Obviously if you have the time/chops to do it yourself there are plenty of avenues for self publishing - wiiware/XNA to say the least.