I was thinking today about how many
developers aren’t very good partners to their publishers. I think too many
developers don’t look at the business aspects involved in game making. I
think this is one area, because we’ve been a publisher too, that can help
potential publishers as we look forward.
A good developer should be thinking
about how they can make the life of the publisher easier. Publishers have 3
major jobs:
1)
Distribution. This is the big one –
getting the game in the store.
2)
Marketing. Getting people to know
about the game.
3)
Support. Helping people who run into
problems and building a community.
These are very expensive
things.
We’re unusual as a game “studio” in
that we have significant publisher infrastructure internally.
We can’t help much on distribution,
that is ultimately why we have moved away from publishing games and instead
working with others. But in terms of marketing we can help a lot more than
most game studios can because we have our own full time PR team that can get the
word out the entire time.
But in addition, and this has to do
with why selling the game directly matters too, we also take care of virtually
all the technical support for the game.
For example, with
PoliticalMachine.com, we aren’t just trying to sell the game, we are supporting
the game both in terms of people having questions and fixing problems but in
terms of distributing updates to the game. We provide the bandwidth and
technology to get new versions to users. The net result is that customers end up
having a much better experience with us than otherwise which in turn reflects
well on our publisher.
I tend to think of the support
aspect as a necessary evil that publishers end up having to pick up because most
developers just don’t have the resources to do it. But we do have the
resources – the people, the IT resources, the bandwidth, and the
technology. So this is something we can bring to the table to help
publishers streamline their processes, keep costs down.
What we get in return is the ability
to have a much more intimate relationship with the customers and we can sell the
game direct which doesn’t mean so much right after release (virtually all
1st year revenue comes from retail NORMALLY), but makes a big
difference after the game has left the retail space and we’re still left with
the support for the game.