In business negotiations I work off a fairly straight forward principle: Enlightened self interest.

This principle has many other terms that describe it. Win-Win, success has many fathers, to name two. I don't approach negotiations as a zero sum game.  With partners and employees, we try to do everything we can to make sure they benefit from the deal as much as possible as long as we too are benefiting at an acceptable level.

Why? Because having other people rooting for your success is a sure-fire way to ensure your own long term success.  It is important to get other companies and people to see you as a means to their own success.

That's why I get really flummoxed when I occasionally run into someone who approaches negotiations as a win-lose proposition.  As if us benefiting somehow comes at their expense.  It doesn't happen often, thankfully, but when it does, I'm out in the cold in trying to try to understand their mindset.  I'll wrap my mind around it trying to figure out what I'm missing.

There are lots of really good examples which would illustrate my point really well but I am not at liberty to discuss them.  Most of the time, the scenario revolves around us being willing to do something we don't have to in order to benefit both parties (at our expense) but as a result we benefit from the transaction as much as the other party.   And they'll reject this because they object to us benefiting as much as we do.

Let me give one example that isn't nearly as good as the one that came up today but at least I can talk about it.  Skin authors.  Stardock will sometimes pay skin authors on a royalty basis of 20% to 25% on each sale of a premium skin.  We've had skin authors reject this offer because they don't think it is "fair" that we end up making so much more than they do. 

Now, putting aside all the costs and infrastructure that we bring to the table that justifies that amount, let's assume that we're just leeching off their work in some "unfair" manner. So what? The question isn't what percent they receive. The question is how much revenue will they get from working with us.  If their 25% comes out to being $4000 isn't that better than making 100% of $1000?  Does it matter if we made $12,000 and they "only" made $4000?

Game publishers we work with tend to find us very easy to deal with because we have no problem with royalty percentages.  We don't care how much the publisher is making off the title.  We only care about how much we are making.  We sincerely hope that our publishers make a killing on our titles because it gives them an incentive to work even harder promoting it.

Strategy First certainly benefited from that with Galactic Civilizations.  By letting Stardock sell the game directly from their website, we could justify helping out on the marketing in ways few publishers can dream of.  Direct sales enabled us to fund regular update releases of the game which kept the title in the store for a very long amount of time (a year and a half later and it's still available at Gamestop).

Strategy First, generaly, worked on the principle of enlightened self-interest in that case.  They didn't get revenue from sales that went through the website but they sold a lot more copies at retail. To my knowledge, Galactic Civilizations is the best selling Strategy First title of all time by a very very wide margin (i.e. higher than Kohan, Chrome, Orb, Europa Universalis, etc.). I mean not even close.  That wasn't because GalCiv was better but because of al the marketing we could put into the game long after release because of continued sales.  They won and we won.

So if you're in negotiations with someone, don't think about it as an adversarial relationship. Avoid that. And try to avoid companies that approach things that way. Try to work to ensure that both you and they benefit.  Becaues if they are benefiting and you are benefiting, then helping you succeed is in their best interest.