Shockwave.com other Portals - Question

Hi

I was wondering if any of you who have had a game published on shockwave.com could give me a little insight. I submitted a game to them over 2 weeks ago, in hope that they would accept it and add it to the portal.

I have heard nothing from them in 2 whole weeks. After a few days of nothing I wrote them an email asking when I should expect to receive a response and requesting a confirmation of our game submission. As I said I have received nothing from them, not even an auto response saying "thank you for submitting a game to us".

I find this rather disturbing, are they always this slow and unprofessional? Is this the sate of Indy game development in general? My team and I worked hard to build our game as best as we could in as short a time period as possible, we expected the portals to treat us with the same grade of professionalism that we worked hard to obtain.

Are we really supposed to wait 2 or 3 weeks with out hearing a word from them? This adds a discouraging amount of dead weight to our development cycle, as it means it could take a month or two to get a completed game on a portal.

So those of you who have worked with shockwave.com is this the kind of response we are supposed to expect: A long time of silence? And have any of you worked with other portals, if so which ones have you been pleased to work with? As we are interested in looking into other options. - Jeff McArthur

 

haven't submitted anything yet myself but would like to know about this as well, also just in case you missed it:

http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=13145

: )

 

I sent an email to Kongregate a few days ago asking if they had any Unity support planned; so far I have yet to get a reply. (In their defense, it has been just over a weekend, so I'll refrain from passing judgement until midweek or so)...

 

Unfortunately shockwave.com does _not_ reply to every submission, so generally two+ weeks of silence can either mean that they're super busy or that they've passively declined your submission. The problem on their end is the sheer volume of submissions so they cannot manually write back to everyone with their submission status (although an autoreply to indicate that it's been received doesn't seem out of line).

If anyone submits and doesn't hear back, and you want some follow-up, then please contact me and I'll poke/prod to find out what I can. If you do write me then please indicate the title and date of your submission, thanks.


As to kongregate.com, they're repeatedly indicated that they're interested in hosting Unity content but I've not had any luck in getting in touch with them. I'll admit that I've been trying to use their CEO as my point of contact (we somewhat know each other and he's been responsive in the past), but I've now more recently poked a few others and hope to hear back soon.

 

Thats sad to know, that they are so unprofessional in their submition and rejection process. How hard would it be for them to write a system where all they have to do is click a button to have an auto submission rejected email sent back on submissions they have rejected. Also they realy need an auto response stating that a game was submited, and explaining how the submission process works. Which right now would be if you don't hear anything in "blank" amount of time we sugest you move on.

If you would like to prod them about it the game is called Open Fire Gold and it was submitted somewhere around the 19th or 20th of July.

On another note what other portals would you all sugest. I'll send an email to Kongragate so that they keep being reminded that there is Unity content we would like up on the site, and I'll look into that Indian portal that drJones linked to some info about. - Jeff

 

Even those that I speak with recognize that this is not an optimal situation, and updating their system isn't really a trivial task at the moment. They're currently using a system that's a bit old and likely on its last legs so hopefully they'll make changes in the future. Worth noting is that I've already registered some feedback with them regarding the overall process as it is today after having handled these sorts of situations already.

Will do.

Definitely keep pushing on Kongregate and definitely look into that Indian portal as that's a huge and heavy consuming audience for casual games.

 

I wouldn't feel bad about this as for instance it took Unity3D over 1.5 months replying to my iPhone question...