I''m getting way ahead of myself here, but I''m the curious sort, so I''ll present you with a brief question. If I had a good--no great, working, finished game sitting on my disk, and wanted to try and strike a publishing deal; would I be stupid to release a demo to the public before I approached any publishers? I guess there are three possible outcomes if I did; *) it gets a lousy reception, and all publishers would bin it the second they saw it. this is fine, as I wouldn''t want my name attached to crappy software anyhow. *) it gets a great reception, and publishers would instantly umbrace. *) any publisher would''nt want to touch it with a ten-foot pole, regardless of the reception it got, as it had already been released without their name on it. what do you think?

Yeah you are right in some points that this is most usefull to go see a publisher with an Alpha version instead than with a final version of your product. But if you miss theses steps there are some publisher who only wants to review finished games. Yeah I know this seems unbelievable ... but it is the politic of some of em to review only theses...

One of em that I know is Interplay... if you do not have a finished game dont even think about them for publishing.. and your finish game must be a damn good one!

This was my 2 cents.

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster

Yeah you are right in some points that this is most usefull to go see a publisher with an Alpha version instead than with a final version of your product.

hm. why is this? to not spend a lot of time implementing features that''ll get slashed/changed?

I''m not doing this for the money, so I''d certainly feel more confident the more complete the game was (and the more proud I was of it).