Recently I spoke with some young developers who were curious as to how they might get their game on some of the digital delivery platforms. I had to admit that I didn’t know and that the websites in question didn’t really tell you anything. So I thought that I would do some research, pull it together and give it to you straight. Here’s what I found out.

I contacted several of the larger portals including Steam, Impulse, GamersGate and Blitz1Up (who just recently opened a direct sell website) and Metaboli. After several weeks, of those five, GamersGate and Blitz1Up were the most forthcoming with information.

In fact Valve/Steam, Impulse and Metaboli all ignored my request for inclusion in the article altogether. If they’re going to do that to someone writing an article about how to get games on their platforms, imagine how they will respond to developers who actually want to do it.

I’ve decided to break this up into a series of articles, each focusing on a specific digital delivery portal and so today is Gamersgate.

I spoke with Theodore Bergquist, the CEO of GamersGate.com, about the entire process and all the pertinent information. He was completely happy to give us the scoop on how they work. To me, it means they are a company that you can trust because they are not hiding any information. As a business person and member of the press nothing makes me more suspicious than when a company obfuscates information that they know many will be searching for. Companies give off an elitist attitude when they do that and I felt none of that from Gamersgate whom I deal with on a regular basis and have found to be friendly and professional.

In the course of my years as a games journalist I’ve often run into young game developers who wanted to know how to get their game on the digital delivery portals an I thought it was a good place to start. Theo tells us that it’s pretty simple at GamersGate and all a game developer needs to do is

"just contact our [GamersGate] partner manager ( publisher (at) gamersgate (dot) com ). We take a quick look at the game to see if the quality is good enough (no major bugs etc) and then we sign a contract and do a marketing and sales plan for the game."

Here’s the rest of the Q&A with Theodore Bergquist:

How long does it take from initial contact to ready for sale?

That depends. For major publishers it may take months, due to QA, release dates etc. Usually for a minor/indie developer with a ready-to-release-game it takes one or two weeks.