Game Promotion companies - they suck?

So, having decided to start doing marketing for my games, I decided it was time to investigate who was out there that handled promoting games themselves, what they did, how the did it, etc. I've come to a conclusion.

Game promotion companies suck for online game promotion.

There's a good number of them out there that offer services for Shareware / Indie titles. Unluckly, what they do is handle submission of your program to most of the various shareware sites, and give you back statistics on it. For a REALLY heavy duty price. (One company wanted to charge me $750 / mo. for doing basically the same thing, plus some keyword work on the website. Per MONTH. Sheesh!)

At one time CyprMedia was doing PR work for games, but they have moved on to handling general advocacy of Indie Gaming instead. LinnPR is dead now.

Does anyone else exist that does full service marketing / PR work for online games that is clueful and does some actual work that I can't do with a copy of SubMass and some intelligence?


And if they don't... may I suggest that someone could do a good side business handling something like this! ;-) (Note I say side business - I'm not sure you could make enough money for a day job doin' it - us Indies are cheap. But if you had a proven track record after some titles that were visible, and could show a serious increase in profits, then us Indies start opening pocket books ;-)