I'm using Shareware tracker to submit my games to 300+ sites.
Recently I've noticed that most of sites are starting to charge for submission, or they're offering "quick-submission-in-one-business-day" for a price, while the other one is free (but can take one month before your game is shown in their listing.

I'm a bit worried about this situation... if every site starts to charge even only 9$ for submission, to get one game in all of them would cost over 1000$ !!! :(

Common Jack!

You will spend that 1000$ on Google Adwords and receive very good traffic specifically narrowed to your needs and directly onto your site.

So, this is looking very promissing really! Let them kill themselves! :D It would be easier to work with really good ones ;)

I'm tempted by Google Adwords, but I'll wait until the new changes to the clicking rules are made...
Now ppl can just click on the ad and instantly go back or change page and you still pay for that click even if the person had never looked at your products.
With new rules, you'll pay only if click lead to a sale or at least a download, and that's much better :)

You're right in saying that if many more sites start charging for submissions, then the whole process could become very costly indeed!, I just hope sites allow quality freeware to be listed for nothing.

It doesn't bother me too much. Free exposure is nice, but ultimately this is just more motivation to be creative with marketing instead of doing the "submit to 300+ sites" formula that everyone else does and expecting it to work. Considering that not even download.com will not necessarily give you a worthwhile amount of sales, it's difficult to believe any of those other sites could be worth it. I wouldn't pay for any but the absolute best listings.

I ignore the pay-listings (and the "featured listings") on obscure software pages. I like being listed, but I also recognize that they aren't going to give me anywhere near enough traffic to justify any cash outlay. In fact, most of the time all they're good for is another link to my site that Google and the search engines can use in calculating my search ranking.

I pay for download.com to update my listing of The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal) a couple times a year, at particular times (example: just before school starts), because being "new" at those times pays well (for me).

If a Web site doesn't represent the exact demographic you're looking for (red-headed, left-handed, soccer players who like quiche) or doesn't have an amazing amount of non-specific traffic (like download.com), it's almost never cost-effective to pay for a listing or advertise on that site.

-David

I guess another possible way to look at it, by having these sites charge for submissions it reduces the "noise" (assuming they get rid of free listings) and increases the chances of your product being noticed.

While not all 300 sites may be worth paying for, there may be 10-20 listings that are much improved with the reduced "noise", so paying for those few listings could be a lot more valuable than 300-400 free listings.

We'll see.