GOG.com Now Taking Indie Submissions
I’m not entirely sure what’s changed in their process. Afterall, their indie category has existed for a while now and includes lots of games such as Fez, FTL, and a good many others that are both big names in the scene and ones that I’ve never heard of. But GOG.com is now officially accepting submissions from indie devs. This would seem to be good news in light of the convoluted Steam Greenlight process having made things increasingly difficult for indies to get their games available to mass markets.
I’ve bought a few games from there in the past… actually this past December I went a little wild picking up large parts of the old Sierra library of Quest and Gabriel Knight games. It’s also where I bought Fez and the three Thief games from. It’s a pretty solid site in my opinion, and given that the games are all DRM free, I feel pretty comfortable buying from them.
Their process sounds very similar to what Valve used to do with steam:
We want to start our relationship by giving you something no one else will give you. If we decide to work together, we can offer you the option to get an advance on your game’s future sales. There are two ways we can handle royalties:
- A standard 70/30 (Developer/GOG) split with no advance on royalties.
- You get an advance on the royalties from your game. In this case, 60/40 royalties split will be in effect until the advance is recouped. Afterwards, we’ll switch the split to the standard 70/30.
We’ll tell you exactly what we think about your title. We know our users’ tastes, and we do our best to present them with a selection of DRM-free games they’ll enjoy. We review all submissions and pick those that offer the qualities our users value most, such as gameplay depth, originality, and a high level of polish.
We will contact you directly to tell you how your title fits with those standards in our opinion. Whether we decide to accept your game or not, you will hear from us within two business weeks on average. We will never leave you without feedback!
Every time we release a game on GOG.com, it gets a dedicated cross-media marketing campaign. It becomes our site’s main feature, with an extra-large header banner and a frontpage news article. We’ll also promote the release of your game to thousands of our social media followers (on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, etc.). We’ll post your game’s trailer on our YouTube channel and feature it in our weekly video editorial.
We’re also eager to work with you on other special events and actions to make your game’s campaign unique. We love to go a bit crazy with our marketing, and we hope you’ll get on board with our ideas.
Maybe this is where we might end up trying to target our initial release for Super Hematoma?