So..having a look on ebay and cheapest flash stick I can see is £2.19 ($3.40) for a 4gig stick, yes games can be anything from a few Mb to 20 Gb, however if you bought these flash drives at wholesale bulk prices could you not still save money distributing your game this way. If your game was £10 and you got a stick for £1 + p & p you would still be at about 12 - 13% distibuting costs. Is this possible?

It's certainly possible, but I would prefer DVD (which is even cheaper in bulk, and more "common") or download (which is, yet cheaper, easier for updates, and no physical handling to do).

Distributing your software on a "kind of dongle" (which is what a stick looks like) may indeed cause acceptance to be somewhat lower. Apart from that, it is of course a perfectly good medium, but you give yourself a kind of "weirdo" appearance if you use it, since apart from some "Linux on a stick" rescue disk distros, virtually nobody else does.

However, I'm not completely buying the "could carry a virus" argument. The same could be said about a DVD or a downloadable installer. In fact, downloadable installers not rarely contain drive-by installs (Sourceforge, anyone?), which are a source of long discussions on sites like reddit or slashdot (or whatever is "in" currently).

The only real downside to a stick is that it's writeable, so you could place a virus (which is already on your system!) on there, or could accidentially erase it. But of course you could also accidentially drop an install DVD into the document shredder.

Is this possible?

Possible? Sure.

It introduces barriers between your product and your customer, which is probably not the intended effect.

The holy grail is the zero step {play} which you get with web games.

One option is {download, play} which you get with big distributors like steam.

Another option is {download, install, play} if you distribute on your site or through many online stores.

For major retail it is {buy from store, install from media, install updates, play}, and many people complain about it. Stores are out, media can have problems. The only good side is it works well in low-bandwidth regions.

You are proposing {order, wait for shipping, install from media, install updates, play}. That is just about the worst case when it comes to distribution. Nobody likes doing this pattern, even for popular games. People will do it with major titles when all the other options are not available.

Distributing a USB stick could very well be an alternative to distributing other physical media, but as has been pointed out, physical discs are cheaper than USB sticks when mass produced.

The cost of the media is usually not the determining factor. The determining factor is usually local availability in retail stores and bandwidth.

Is this possible?

Possible? Sure.

It introduces barriers between your product and your customer, which is probably not the intended effect.

The holy grail is the zero step {play} which you get with web games.

One option is {download, play} which you get with big distributors like steam.

Another option is {download, install, play} if you distribute on your site or through many online stores.

For major retail it is {buy from store, install from media, install updates, play}, and many people complain about it. Stores are out, media can have problems. The only good side is it works well in low-bandwidth regions.

You are proposing {order, wait for shipping, install from media, install updates, play}. That is just about the worst case when it comes to distribution. Nobody likes doing this pattern, even for popular games. People will do it with major titles when all the other options are not available.

Distributing a USB stick could very well be an alternative to distributing other physical media, but as has been pointed out, physical discs are cheaper than USB sticks when mass produced.

The cost of the media is usually not the determining factor. The determining factor is usually local availability in retail stores and bandwidth.

I see, well how about using a cheaper disc publisher such as these guys http://pandagm.com I think they are in China. It doesn't say if they do box art, if not how would you get that done, I assume they have packaging, what do you think?

Discs (DVDs and CDs - remember, DVDs are 4.7 GB) are really inexpensive in bulk. Almost all of them are manufactured in Taiwan now (or, at least that's what I'm told. I can't find information about this online though).

Fun fact: Those tiny little micro-discs you can get? (mini-cds and business-card-cds) It's actually cheaper for the manufacturers of discs to bulk-produce normal size CDs and DVDs, and then just cut some of them into smaller discs. That's why the smaller discs are more expensive. (A chinese gentleman I stayed with for a few days told me this - he worked for one of the three largest disc manufacturers)

There are plenty of companies within the USA who, using blank CDs purchased overseas, can press your game onto them in bulk. The benefit of USA companies is that you have stronger legal recourse against them if you need it, and also that you can probably visit independently owned local businesses in your area, and might be able to negotiate deals in-person.

You may need to use one company for pressing the CDs, another for manufacturing your box art, another for other items you might include in your box (manual, or world map, or whatever), with you and family/friends then assembling the flat boxes into shape and putting the CD and other objects in them. You can also go with DVD cases instead of boxes, and then print (using a professional printer shop - plenty local in the USA you can visit in person in your area. "Kinko's" is a popular one).

Trying to find one company to do it all for you is certainly possible, but my instinct says it'd probably increase the overall price since you're buying convenience and only wanting a few thousand copies, and not actually buying economy of scale and a few hundred thousand. The ones that operate at real economies of scale probably aren't even interested in orders of less than 20,000 at a time since their equipment is set up for batches of large numbers like that. Asking them to manufacture 1/10th of a batch at a time is like asking a baker to bake you 1/10th of a donut.

So you're likely looking for more of a 'Vanity press'-esqe manufacturer rather than an economy-of-scale manufacturer, with costs more per item (but still within reason), and you can likely save by doing the final assembly (putting the discs in the cases, putting the DVD artwork in the DVD cases' cover slips, shrink-wrapping them yourself, etc... Heck, if you have a little capital, you can even burn your own DVDs by buying a dedicated burner machine.

Disc burners are available that do 4 or 5 discs at a time - my church has one of these for burning each week's sunday service for delivery to church members unable to leave their houses due to disabillities or old age - they require manually reloading the discs every two or three minutes, but that cuts you from, say, 2000 manual operations to 400 - much more manageable, especially if you have someone who can help relieve you, and if you spread out your work over several days for sanity's sake. (Here's 11-discs at a time one. For 2000 copies, you only need to reload it 200 times, which is once every 5 minutes for only 20 hours - or 4 hours a day for five days, while you're at your computer doing work anyway)
DVD pirates in 3rd world countries have towers like these to produce illegal DVDs to sell on the street.
You might even be able to build your own - I've never tried it myself. You could start collecting old laptop DVD drives; I have three unused DVD drives in my room right now, and I'm not even a real hardware techy. Lots of people through away their laptops every two years or so - laptops don't last long - but the DVD drives are usually in fine condition. Check your local salvage yard or garbage dump.

Or you can get disc burners that take entire stacks of discs at just work continuously through the night. You might even be able to rent one - though I wouldn't know where to look for one to rent - maybe a local sound studio? Maybe you can pay your local sound studio to press the discs for you.

The biggest problem burning your own discs is making sure the discs have your artwork on them instead of a cheap "blank disc" logo on the front. Trying to use the "disc labels" that are sold all over the place just makes the label delaminate and peel off in the high heat of the rotating disc drives of users, potentially damaging their drives. So that's the only 'con' to burning your own discs. If someone has a better solution to full-color disc labels that don't peel off, self-burning would probably be the better way to go for anything less than 5000 discs at a time.

One example of a Vanity Press DVD burning service, is Oasis. They do the whole disc burning + labeling + dvd cases + dvd artwork + shrinkwrapping for you. You can assemble and choose your options and the website will calculate the cost for you.

The only problem here is that Steam/Value/Greenight may not accpet your game, there are other DD sites yes, but I was curious about semi-self publishing options, I mean all pubishers had to start somewhere. This is all good info though, I've learned a lot.

The only problem here is that Steam/Value/Greenight may not accpet your game

Why should they? Even major retailers like Walmart don't accept your game. You pay them to get put on store shelves, and you pay more to be featured in the ads. Even though games like Madden generate enormous revenues for the retail outlets EA still needs to pay for ads and endcaps and preferred placement on the shelves.

Steam is not about Valve doing publication out of the goodness of their hearts. If you want to be on Steam and featured prominently you will need to pay.

If they think your game will have sufficient distribution they will take a cut off the top.

You can pay them to do the job of publisher and distributor and negotiate a different rate.

I mean all pubishers had to start somewhere.

Publishers provide services. Those services are not free.

You can choose to self-publish but then you are still paying for the services without the benefit of scale.

It is very rare that you can build a project where the publisher is willing to do something at zero cost, or even pay you for an action. It is rare, but it happens, like when Apple paid EA a "truckload of money" to release PvZ2 on Apple several months before Android.