Maikin' money with indie games

I wrote a kind of cool version of my GDC report aimed at Telltale's audience on as a Telltale blog entry on our site. What started as a joke sub-heading "Will Wright Announces the Rebirth of the Adventure Game" became, as I wrote it, a Greg Costikyan inspired rant on "stickin it to the man". On Greg's weblog, he continued his rant from GDC by saying that he had no real idea what to do about it. Which created alot of discussion. The problem is this: you have a cool new game. It is downloadable from your web-site, in order to bypass the whole publisher deal problem. So now what? Even if your game is the super-coolest game ever, who is going to buy it if they don't even know it exists? Take our Telltale Texas Hold Em. It's funny, it's fun, but just not enough people realize it exists. Comic Relief in Berkeley lets people sell their 'zines at their store. In fact, that's how our lead art dude Graham Annable's Grickle got its start. What do you think EB games would do if I walked in with a stack of Texas Hold 'Em discs? Show me the door. There are a number of portal sites devoted to distribution of independant titles, usually casual market games. I have been looking around alot of these, doing research for Telltale. You see the same games on most of them. And where are the IGF finalists? I think I saw Gish on one portal. Is this because the indie game makers aren't trying or don't know where to go? Or is it because the portals have a certain type of game in mind? I intend to research this some more, and will hopefully be able to compile a list of resources for indie developers wanting to get their games to market.