What are some good RPG publishers? I want to go with Spiderweb Software, but it doesn't look like they have much experience in publishing RPGs

What do you mean? Jeff Vogel (the progenitor of spiderweb software) has been successfully developing and self publishing RPGs for years. He's been successful at it too, working full time a house in the Seattle area, some employees, he's not doing too bad for himself I would say.

I don’t want to come across as an advocate of indie publishers everywhere, because I’m not, there are definitely some stinkers out there. But I don’t believe Spiderweb Software is one of them. Jeff might not have Steve's nack for whatever it is that makes people email Steve with questions about “how to be successful” every day, but he's definitely a good guy who knows his stuff.

yeah, I know Jeff has a lot of experience in Making RPGs(as well as how successful he is at doing it). Not to change the subject or anything but Jeff's main problem with designing RPGs is that he goes with his interests and not with the peoples interests (and yes thats bad). To give an example, everyone wants to see more music in the game (only music is in that intro picture), but jeff woun't do it because he hates music. One thing I hate is that his games seem like their copied from exile a little bit (even with geneforge).

Yeah, but the fact remains he's still pretty successful at selling them regardless of his development ideals. Heck John Carmack axed a "use" button from Doom3 because he didn't feel it was essential to the gameplay. It's still going to sell like hotcakes though. ;)

(and I loved geneforge, though I haven't played the exile series)

After spiderweb I can't think of any other individuals who are consistently successful at selling shareware RPG's online.

Yes he's very successful, I too have never seen a shareware company that did as good as Jeff's company. I can't wait for geneforge 2 to come out because I loved geneforge as well

> After spiderweb I can't think of any other individuals who are consistently successful at selling shareware RPG's online.

Then you should check out Fantasoft and AmbrosiaSw. They do much better than Jeff. :)

Ambrosia (http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/)
fantasoft (http://www.fantasoft.com/)

for those who are interested. Ambrosia is MAC only so it's probably not going to help you. Fantasoft is new to me though....

Ambrosia only publish Mac games. They do have a couple of windows versions of their games (coldstone and the upcoming ev:vova (pc)).

The only RPG I found there that was in Windows sucked a big one (Relmz), are there any other Shareware RPG companies that have windows games?