While submitting my new UBM game to sites, I've noticed that both the old ones and some new shareware sites have always THE SAME GAMES in their "featured" or "top-spot" pages.
They're mostly PopCap games.

Now I say: "People won't get tired of seeing ALWAYS the same games everywhere? isn't the market saturated of those games? not everyone is looking for a puzzle/word game..."

I've talked with some ppl that sell PopCap games, and they say that their CR is terrible, take 1 million of download to sell. Still, if they're featured EVERYWHERE, it's normal that they still sell well... it seems a bit a stupid thing to me, not leaving any space to new promising games!
I am not talking about UBM (even if the start is great is too early to tell) but a lot of other games...

Thank god it's not just me!

I was starting to think that I wouldn't be able to break into the "shareware-ish" market UNLESS I make a puzzle/word game of some sort..;)

I know what you mean, they must pay for the featured listings I guess.

Yes, but some really unknown site still have popcap games, and if I click the buynow link, their affiliate regnow id appears.
Why doing that is absurd for me.
As a regnow affiliate you get really poor $$ for every sale, then why put only popcap games on sale as affiliate? that market is quite saturated.
I hope some ppl will change their mind, or the shareware world will be considered *only* worth of puzzle/word/tetris games!

Nothing personal against them, I even made a puzzle game myself :) but I don't want to make ONLY those kind of games!!! :)

couldn't agree more. do you think advertising is the answer? maybe if you spend a thousand dollars on paid listings you can raise your games profile high enough to get noticed perhaps?

That's a good question, cliff.
Surely you have more experience than me, being indie since more time.
I guess that paid advertising would be a solution. If your product is good, I guess that word of mouth can work better with rpg/simulations/strategy games than with puzzles.
Also because there are far more puzzle/word games than strategic/simulation ones.
I once got a news on sportplanet, a site of the gamespy network, that leads to a lot of USM downloads. And that was a simple news.
I guess that also review may be a good way, of course if the reviewer understands that it's a shareware game and shouldn't be really compared to the multi-millionaire productions of big publishers...!!

Developing shareware sites to promote own software is not uncommon ;)

Developing shareware sites to promote own software is not uncommon
damn, you caught me :D