Game Tycoon

When Christian Nutt asked me to write an article for Gamasutra on the topic of publishers, I wasn’t sure what to do. Spry Fox is relatively committed to self-publishing our games and I haven’t kept up with developments in the publishing space. So after writing and discarding a few half-hearted introductions to this article, I decided that the most useful and honest thing that I could do is simply explain why, with one aging exception, Spry Fox has avoided working with publishers.

An important thing to bear in mind, if you’re not familiar with our company, is that we are primarily focused on developing F2P games that we hope to maintain and evolve for years to come. We haven’t been trying to secure a slot on XBLA and we haven’t been trying to sell boxed product. We view everything through the lens of “will this partnership enable us to make a better game, to learn important lessons and to eventually become more independent.”

So, that said: I’ve met a few really interesting publishers in the past couple years; folks who seems smart, motivated and knowledgeable about things that I wish I knew more about. We haven’t done any deals. Why? It always comes down to three issues:

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This article was originally published in Game Developer Magazine. It was the sixth in a series of business columns that I am writing for GDM.

Back when I worked for Xbox LIVE, I frequently commented on the dangers of what I called “developer tunnel vision.” Nearly all of the devs I spoke with were not paying attention to a diverse set of industry news sources. What’s more, they were focused on at most couple of similar platforms, and were ignoring the rest of the market. (Back then, everyone was talking about XBLA/PSN; today it’s Steam/iOS; tomorrow it will be something else.)

At the time, this seemed completely insane to me—even suicidal. Didn’t these devs understand how quickly things change in our industry? How quickly their current efforts could be rendered irrelevant by shifts in the marketplace, or by strategy shifts made by the platforms? Developer tunnel vision…it was so obviously reckless and short-sighted!

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This article was originally published in Game Developer Magazine. It was the fourth in a series of business columns that I am writing for GDM.

Some lessons are harder to learn than others. One of the toughest lessons you may ever learn is that granting someone a generous share of the revenue from your game in exchange for a service (assistance with development; publishing; etc) does not mean that you can assume your incentives are properly aligned.

Say that you give a publisher 50% of the revenue from your game in order to promote the game, to handle customer service, etc. Or perhaps you’ve agreed to develop a game in tandem with a few other individuals and split the future revenue equally. In either case, you’re making an important assumption: that a significant percentage of future profits will ensure that all parties will do their “best” to make the game a success. And sometimes, that’s exactly what happens. But not always, unfortunately.

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