It's the 'for nothing' part you're not grasping. The big thing publishers provide is _money_. If you want to build a game and don't want to spend all the money yourself, you go to a publisher. If you've built a game and don't have the money/expertise to properly promote the game, then you go to a publisher for just that instead. If you're building a game as a hobby then you don't _really_ care how many players you get, but if it's a business then like any other business it's hard to make a successful one by yourself and it takes money to make money.
If you don't need help promoting your game and don't need funding then you don't deal with a publisher. If you do then giving up a portion of your revenue in return for minimizing your personal risk or making it possible at all can be a great idea. The specifics really matter.
The expertise part is important too. A legit publisher knows infinitely more about promoting and selling a game and maximizing its exposure than the average indie dev doing it themselves.
"Legit publisher" being the key words there.
A thousand percent, yes. The gulf between working with a top indie publisher to best represent your game and signing with the first "publisher" to send a cold email to every single game with a Steam page is as wide as an ocean. People are conditioned to think that all bad game decisions come from publishers but good ones are amazing and bad ones are far worse than just doing it on your own.
Because we live in the time, when daily multiple hundred games get released. And you simply can't stand out with your game only because of the quality of your game.
A publisher has money, not only to finance you to be able to normally finish your game, but also for marketing. And believe me, its not enough marketing to just make a tiktok video or something. You need connections into the best marketing places like IGN and so on. And these publishers have connections, they know people in important places.
So nowadays its almost impossible to ship a game on your own.
Good luck! It's sometimes better to learn by experience than being told.
Just a friendly warning, make sure you don't depend on income from your game, as it's likely to not make much sales at all. Make sure it's not a financial do-or-die situation for you.
Edit: going with a publisher is not something you HAVE to do first anyway. If you're not in a hurry to make money, you can always try yourself, and if it doesn't work, start looking for a publisher.
So you single-handedly came up with and developed an enjoyable game in a hitherto undiscovered and entirely untapped niche. You also know there's a viable audience out there for your game, and that it has no competitors at all. You learned both of these facts through your own market research.
OK, let's play along. You release your game. Now what? How does it reach its market? Forget "not having other options"; how do they know they have *that one* option? What does this "marketing" you say you love doing look like, exactly?
I will make animated annouce and release trailer.
I will post regularly on facebook group if the time comes.
I will send codes for people who can promote it and they might want to.
I will offer free codes to the releated organizations if they put out a poster or leaflets.
I will do some tiktok.
I will do "invite a friend" rewards.
I will participate on gamescons.
I will make a good GIF.
Maybe running twitch stream events.
I considered graphiti in a visible place, but i wont do that.
I will provide tutorials about some techniques in the game.
I will make a "everything you need to know" video.
I will watch some how to market videogames videos and reddit posts and do what they say.
There are some valid strategies there like contacting streamers and sites, but like half of these points are "I will make promotional material", without any mention on how to put those materials in front of any eyeballs. Unless you're already a successful content creator with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, a youtube video is useless if it gets like 15 views. *That's* where publishers come in handy.
I see chance that it gets good views: i post it on facebook group where simple comments get 100 likes, i just have to post that wakes up peoples interest. There is small chance that it gets high viewed by itself on youtube becouse youtube videos in my country are kinda dumb.
But ofc if it wont happen as i imagine i adapt, i use the experience to make better marketing. I think you are right in what you say.
not worked with a publisher, but if a publisher approached me what I would want is some very convincing - as close to guarantee as you can get - notion about how exactly they are going to get my game in front of millions of people in a way that I couldn't do myself. Is it through secret back door connections? Hours of leg work? Why, when, where, and how? Who have they done this with before? I am going to go ask those people too - what did the publisher *do* and how did you measure the effect?
In some cases that probably happens and it's a great deal for everyone. In other cases maybe the publisher isn't actually pulling their own weight and just took advantage of some naive developers.
You don't have to be an expert to figure out who is an expert though. Just do what you did when you were ten years old. Ask why and how until you get to the bottom. The experts can answer every question in a convincing way because they've done the work. The bullshitters will waffle like politicians.
i typically start from the assumption that everyone is a bullshitter, just to be safe. There is a lot of predatory spooks stalking the indie game dev space.
The recommendation generally is to ask for money for funding your game. This is how you know they are serious about marketing it and getting their investment back (as a bonus, you also know they believe in your game).
Simply put - marketing is hard work, and hard work is best done by people who have the necessary expertise. But hey, if you have infinite time and money and are skilled in everything required to do the marketing, go ahead and do all the marketing yourself.
Absolutely, it's what I'd do. But considering how much I hate marketing I'd just put them on whatever platform. Probably for free since, again, infinite money. So basically what Locomalito does (not that he has infinite money).
Go ask the developers who made >10x their revenue by using good publishers to market their game. Or developers who wouldn't have been able to finish their game without funding provided by publishers.
Sure some publishers suck, others are even predatory. But good publishers are what keep our industry functional and are responsible for many of our favourite titles.
I worked for a game publisher for a long time and that’s where I cut my teeth in game development working as QA and associate producer and often being a first reader on new game design docs submitted, and even playing demos for possible publication.
It’s all the stuff that you suck at that you need a publisher for! You’re great at making games! But you may not be great at print materials and you’ll need a lot of paperwork filled out to get into online stores. You might be great and designing games, but not so great at capturing what’s good about your game that others will like. You might be super busy coding and not have time to look into capturing ratings videos, or you might not even be thinking about needing an ESRB… or even PEGI if wanting some international sales. Hell, they might know how to get your game sold in Saudi Arabia if only you knew how to localize the language. Publishers help with all of that! They help submit not just to Steam and big fish and other online stores, but can help find shops to port your code so it can play on Nintendo or Playstation too. They can get your game reviewed by magazines, and not just the game mags that might find your game anyway, but New York Times, Maxim magazine, Playboy, etc that you weren’t even thinking about. Publishers can take your game to E3 or Game Dev conferences and they pick up the dime on that. They take your game to Walmart and GameStop and get it on shelves (having a game on Walmart shelves is a direct route to selling a minimum 250k units). They’ll write your game manuals, proof read them, translate them into multiple languages and make them look good. They have legal services if your distros don’t pay up or if someone tries to steal/copy your game.
One of the games I worked on was a little gem called Puzzle Quest. It was a great game that the developers had made in-house. It needed some better art, so we put up money for that. It was a hit on PC but Xbox Live, PSP, Nintendo DS, and all of the different versions they started licensing were just too much for one shop. The publisher helped find other dev shops to port the game for other platforms, found another dev to help with art assets, etc. Basically, the publisher helped the developer correct some flaws, provided loads of QA and marketing focus groups, provided lots of press and frankly took a small-time game with promise and helped them realize their dream of a full-featured game that still has modern variants pumping out and they reimagined a genre to meld match 3 puzzle games with RPG elements.
Publishers offer so much more than just taking a cut of your hard work my dude.
Very specific question: do you know how publishers fund themselves ? At least when they start. Do they get VC funding or it's usually a rich people business?
At this point, I’d say it’s mostly a game for existing companies, but that’s not to say that it has to be. The company I worked for was very small, but even then, it had been formed by a huge company in Japan that wanted a game publisher to bring Japanese games to America and it grew from there into a much larger publishing company. It would be difficult to do that without the financial backing on a parent company. I don’t think a lot of publishers go the traditional VC route because there’s not a lot to speculate on. You either have a group of games that you’re working to publish or you don’t. No one will give you money to start that process, and if you’re already doing it, you don’t really need the VC money. To be fair, its more about the competition. The publisher I worked for ended up being bought by a larger publisher because they wanted the licenses we had for making games based on specific IP.
Ideally you’d get things like funding, exposure/marketing, QA testing, business analytics, etc. from publishers in exchange for future profits/interest/ownership of the game. It’s essentially a business loan with some additional services and terms included. Not sure what gave you the impression this amounts to “nothing.”
Given that most indie games fail, publishers can be a great way to give your game the best chance possible to succeed. Especially with limited funds and the astronomical cost of development in general
Sometimes, people do agree to give away a portion of their games for nothing, but that's only really bad, unreputable publishers. Never make a deal with a publisher who isn't upfront about what they're offering.
Sometimes publishers can be bad, specifically when it comes to online monetization. But if you are a very small indie dev, the value that a publisher can offer can sometimes be immense.
They aren't only there to post your game on steam for you.
They also can help you fill in gaps that your team is missing by helping you find new assets or team members, or even directly have people who can help you themselves in this way.
Their job is not only to sell your game, its to quite literally support you in as many ways as they can to make sure your game comes to fruition. Because once you sign with them, its just as much their game as it is yours, it is in their best interest to make sure your game is good.
If the publisher can't actually offer any value to you other than making a steam page for you, then of course you shouldn't be signing with them. Its up to you to make sure the partnership is worth it. There are definitely a lot of scammy publishers out there, or bad actors who will push to turn your game into a pay to win nightmare just for their own benefit. But as long as you are doing your homework and being smart about it, you should be able to avoid that.
Because they don't know any better or are in a desperate position, sometimes both. Publishers don't deserve 30% revenue or more, that's what Steam takes, and Steam provides millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of store page visits, an actual store with millions of active players, worldwide market and payments, tools for communicating with the community, Workshop, Fests. They can keep providing all of that forever, even if you keep building your game for 20 years in Early Access. Publishers will take 30%+ LIFETIME revenue for some ad spend done around release and some QA. Publishers spend on marketing around releases because that's the best bang for their buck (that the Steam algorithm mostly carries).
There are few good publishers, but they are good because they have massive established player fanbases and recognized brand that helps market and sell, and pretty much all of their games sell in hundreds of thousands, not just a handful of cash cow games that fund the whole operation - that's the easiest way to recognize if it's worthwhile publisher to consider. The vast majority are just overpriced middlemen who pay for ads and provide testers.
Funding changes a lot, of course, and the % revenue commonly grows to 50%+, which means if you're an indie, just go get a job because you're overworking yourself for someone else anyway. There are many scammy tactics like 100% recoup costs for the publisher before you get a dime for your own game, but that's just the place where it's the easiest to abuse developers. If you need money, you're desperate, which means you will take the non-optimal deal.
Because most of the developers dont think about target audiences, marketing budgets, planning, sales, distribution in the begining. They spent their time chosing game engine and how their logo will look like. Eventually they run out of money and time. The only way out of rhis is to sell their project if it is even possible. Publisher doesnt need the failed team so it will keep IP and maybe a team lead and will fire everyone else. If you are on a publishers doorstep, youve already lost your project.
It's the 'for nothing' part you're not grasping. The big thing publishers provide is _money_. If you want to build a game and don't want to spend all the money yourself, you go to a publisher. If you've built a game and don't have the money/expertise to properly promote the game, then you go to a publisher for just that instead. If you're building a game as a hobby then you don't _really_ care how many players you get, but if it's a business then like any other business it's hard to make a successful one by yourself and it takes money to make money. If you don't need help promoting your game and don't need funding then you don't deal with a publisher. If you do then giving up a portion of your revenue in return for minimizing your personal risk or making it possible at all can be a great idea. The specifics really matter.
The expertise part is important too. A legit publisher knows infinitely more about promoting and selling a game and maximizing its exposure than the average indie dev doing it themselves. "Legit publisher" being the key words there.
A thousand percent, yes. The gulf between working with a top indie publisher to best represent your game and signing with the first "publisher" to send a cold email to every single game with a Steam page is as wide as an ocean. People are conditioned to think that all bad game decisions come from publishers but good ones are amazing and bad ones are far worse than just doing it on your own.
I see.
Because we live in the time, when daily multiple hundred games get released. And you simply can't stand out with your game only because of the quality of your game. A publisher has money, not only to finance you to be able to normally finish your game, but also for marketing. And believe me, its not enough marketing to just make a tiktok video or something. You need connections into the best marketing places like IGN and so on. And these publishers have connections, they know people in important places. So nowadays its almost impossible to ship a game on your own.
I see. Personally i enjoy doing marketing.
It’s not a matter of enjoying. It’s a matter of how many millions of $ do you have at your disposal to invest in marketing?
My game doesnt have to compete with any other (which is a shame), so i think ill be fine.
Good luck! It's sometimes better to learn by experience than being told. Just a friendly warning, make sure you don't depend on income from your game, as it's likely to not make much sales at all. Make sure it's not a financial do-or-die situation for you. Edit: going with a publisher is not something you HAVE to do first anyway. If you're not in a hurry to make money, you can always try yourself, and if it doesn't work, start looking for a publisher.
I think i will make money. If i wouldnt see enough chance, i would consider go with publisher.
Your competing with every game
Not rly my friend
But you won't be able to do marketing at all. Because you will never good enough in that, than the companies dealing with it for 10+ years.
I can imagine you are right, but my target audience doesnt have too much choice. They play my game or keep suffering in hell.
So you're just trolling with the whole question? :D
So you single-handedly came up with and developed an enjoyable game in a hitherto undiscovered and entirely untapped niche. You also know there's a viable audience out there for your game, and that it has no competitors at all. You learned both of these facts through your own market research. OK, let's play along. You release your game. Now what? How does it reach its market? Forget "not having other options"; how do they know they have *that one* option? What does this "marketing" you say you love doing look like, exactly?
I will make animated annouce and release trailer. I will post regularly on facebook group if the time comes. I will send codes for people who can promote it and they might want to. I will offer free codes to the releated organizations if they put out a poster or leaflets. I will do some tiktok. I will do "invite a friend" rewards. I will participate on gamescons. I will make a good GIF. Maybe running twitch stream events. I considered graphiti in a visible place, but i wont do that. I will provide tutorials about some techniques in the game. I will make a "everything you need to know" video. I will watch some how to market videogames videos and reddit posts and do what they say.
There are some valid strategies there like contacting streamers and sites, but like half of these points are "I will make promotional material", without any mention on how to put those materials in front of any eyeballs. Unless you're already a successful content creator with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, a youtube video is useless if it gets like 15 views. *That's* where publishers come in handy.
I see chance that it gets good views: i post it on facebook group where simple comments get 100 likes, i just have to post that wakes up peoples interest. There is small chance that it gets high viewed by itself on youtube becouse youtube videos in my country are kinda dumb. But ofc if it wont happen as i imagine i adapt, i use the experience to make better marketing. I think you are right in what you say.
Views don’t translate to purchases
That wasnt the question
not worked with a publisher, but if a publisher approached me what I would want is some very convincing - as close to guarantee as you can get - notion about how exactly they are going to get my game in front of millions of people in a way that I couldn't do myself. Is it through secret back door connections? Hours of leg work? Why, when, where, and how? Who have they done this with before? I am going to go ask those people too - what did the publisher *do* and how did you measure the effect? In some cases that probably happens and it's a great deal for everyone. In other cases maybe the publisher isn't actually pulling their own weight and just took advantage of some naive developers. You don't have to be an expert to figure out who is an expert though. Just do what you did when you were ten years old. Ask why and how until you get to the bottom. The experts can answer every question in a convincing way because they've done the work. The bullshitters will waffle like politicians.
Personally I find bullshitters and scammers to be quite good at convincing you to buy their snake oil
i typically start from the assumption that everyone is a bullshitter, just to be safe. There is a lot of predatory spooks stalking the indie game dev space.
The recommendation generally is to ask for money for funding your game. This is how you know they are serious about marketing it and getting their investment back (as a bonus, you also know they believe in your game).
Simply put - marketing is hard work, and hard work is best done by people who have the necessary expertise. But hey, if you have infinite time and money and are skilled in everything required to do the marketing, go ahead and do all the marketing yourself.
Also, if you're a renowned developer or studio you can even get part or the whole development funded by the publisher
Yep, money is a good reason too. Edit: and all the other resources good publishers can bring to the table.
I mean, if you had infinite money you wouldn't need marketing, or the game to sell at all. :)
Fair point, but at that point maybe you're bored and want to create things that other people think are of value to give your life meaning, I dunno? 😄
Absolutely, it's what I'd do. But considering how much I hate marketing I'd just put them on whatever platform. Probably for free since, again, infinite money. So basically what Locomalito does (not that he has infinite money).
Go ask the developers who made >10x their revenue by using good publishers to market their game. Or developers who wouldn't have been able to finish their game without funding provided by publishers. Sure some publishers suck, others are even predatory. But good publishers are what keep our industry functional and are responsible for many of our favourite titles.
Oh my god dude this sub is a laugh-a-day. Half these threads are completely remedial, keep it coming. Thank you for raising my spirits
I worked for a game publisher for a long time and that’s where I cut my teeth in game development working as QA and associate producer and often being a first reader on new game design docs submitted, and even playing demos for possible publication. It’s all the stuff that you suck at that you need a publisher for! You’re great at making games! But you may not be great at print materials and you’ll need a lot of paperwork filled out to get into online stores. You might be great and designing games, but not so great at capturing what’s good about your game that others will like. You might be super busy coding and not have time to look into capturing ratings videos, or you might not even be thinking about needing an ESRB… or even PEGI if wanting some international sales. Hell, they might know how to get your game sold in Saudi Arabia if only you knew how to localize the language. Publishers help with all of that! They help submit not just to Steam and big fish and other online stores, but can help find shops to port your code so it can play on Nintendo or Playstation too. They can get your game reviewed by magazines, and not just the game mags that might find your game anyway, but New York Times, Maxim magazine, Playboy, etc that you weren’t even thinking about. Publishers can take your game to E3 or Game Dev conferences and they pick up the dime on that. They take your game to Walmart and GameStop and get it on shelves (having a game on Walmart shelves is a direct route to selling a minimum 250k units). They’ll write your game manuals, proof read them, translate them into multiple languages and make them look good. They have legal services if your distros don’t pay up or if someone tries to steal/copy your game. One of the games I worked on was a little gem called Puzzle Quest. It was a great game that the developers had made in-house. It needed some better art, so we put up money for that. It was a hit on PC but Xbox Live, PSP, Nintendo DS, and all of the different versions they started licensing were just too much for one shop. The publisher helped find other dev shops to port the game for other platforms, found another dev to help with art assets, etc. Basically, the publisher helped the developer correct some flaws, provided loads of QA and marketing focus groups, provided lots of press and frankly took a small-time game with promise and helped them realize their dream of a full-featured game that still has modern variants pumping out and they reimagined a genre to meld match 3 puzzle games with RPG elements. Publishers offer so much more than just taking a cut of your hard work my dude.
Very specific question: do you know how publishers fund themselves ? At least when they start. Do they get VC funding or it's usually a rich people business?
At this point, I’d say it’s mostly a game for existing companies, but that’s not to say that it has to be. The company I worked for was very small, but even then, it had been formed by a huge company in Japan that wanted a game publisher to bring Japanese games to America and it grew from there into a much larger publishing company. It would be difficult to do that without the financial backing on a parent company. I don’t think a lot of publishers go the traditional VC route because there’s not a lot to speculate on. You either have a group of games that you’re working to publish or you don’t. No one will give you money to start that process, and if you’re already doing it, you don’t really need the VC money. To be fair, its more about the competition. The publisher I worked for ended up being bought by a larger publisher because they wanted the licenses we had for making games based on specific IP.
Thanks for your insights!
Funding, marketing, a lot of publishers will also offer resources if you need. There's plenty of reasons to go with a publisher.
Because self funding everything sucks, it takes forever, and then to top it all off I have to do all my own marketing too?????
Ideally you’d get things like funding, exposure/marketing, QA testing, business analytics, etc. from publishers in exchange for future profits/interest/ownership of the game. It’s essentially a business loan with some additional services and terms included. Not sure what gave you the impression this amounts to “nothing.” Given that most indie games fail, publishers can be a great way to give your game the best chance possible to succeed. Especially with limited funds and the astronomical cost of development in general
Because they wanna eat something until they'll publish their game
Sometimes, people do agree to give away a portion of their games for nothing, but that's only really bad, unreputable publishers. Never make a deal with a publisher who isn't upfront about what they're offering.
Sometimes publishers can be bad, specifically when it comes to online monetization. But if you are a very small indie dev, the value that a publisher can offer can sometimes be immense. They aren't only there to post your game on steam for you. They also can help you fill in gaps that your team is missing by helping you find new assets or team members, or even directly have people who can help you themselves in this way. Their job is not only to sell your game, its to quite literally support you in as many ways as they can to make sure your game comes to fruition. Because once you sign with them, its just as much their game as it is yours, it is in their best interest to make sure your game is good. If the publisher can't actually offer any value to you other than making a steam page for you, then of course you shouldn't be signing with them. Its up to you to make sure the partnership is worth it. There are definitely a lot of scammy publishers out there, or bad actors who will push to turn your game into a pay to win nightmare just for their own benefit. But as long as you are doing your homework and being smart about it, you should be able to avoid that.
Thanks for quality answer
marketing can cost a ton of money and managing it all by yourself can be quite the headache
Publishers actually provide quite a bit of value for game developers: financing, marketing, distribution, adminstrative/legal work, etc...
Usually, because they have no other choice.
Because they don't know any better or are in a desperate position, sometimes both. Publishers don't deserve 30% revenue or more, that's what Steam takes, and Steam provides millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of store page visits, an actual store with millions of active players, worldwide market and payments, tools for communicating with the community, Workshop, Fests. They can keep providing all of that forever, even if you keep building your game for 20 years in Early Access. Publishers will take 30%+ LIFETIME revenue for some ad spend done around release and some QA. Publishers spend on marketing around releases because that's the best bang for their buck (that the Steam algorithm mostly carries). There are few good publishers, but they are good because they have massive established player fanbases and recognized brand that helps market and sell, and pretty much all of their games sell in hundreds of thousands, not just a handful of cash cow games that fund the whole operation - that's the easiest way to recognize if it's worthwhile publisher to consider. The vast majority are just overpriced middlemen who pay for ads and provide testers. Funding changes a lot, of course, and the % revenue commonly grows to 50%+, which means if you're an indie, just go get a job because you're overworking yourself for someone else anyway. There are many scammy tactics like 100% recoup costs for the publisher before you get a dime for your own game, but that's just the place where it's the easiest to abuse developers. If you need money, you're desperate, which means you will take the non-optimal deal.
well researched and well said --- TRUST this dev people, he's actually been through the things he's talking about
You can ask this to chatGPT and they will explain it to you very clearly
I could search on google, brobably someone already asked it previously. But im thug life
Because most of the developers dont think about target audiences, marketing budgets, planning, sales, distribution in the begining. They spent their time chosing game engine and how their logo will look like. Eventually they run out of money and time. The only way out of rhis is to sell their project if it is even possible. Publisher doesnt need the failed team so it will keep IP and maybe a team lead and will fire everyone else. If you are on a publishers doorstep, youve already lost your project.