The role of a publisher used to be simple, although the business itself is complex. They would fund your game, they would make sure it was released on consoles or the PC and in exchange they would often own the intellectual property behind the game and take a cut of profits. You needed a publisher to get on consoles and to make sure your game found an audience. They held the keys to the kingdom.
This is no longer the case, and the idea of what a publisher does or doesn’t do, or whether they’re ever needed for smaller developers, is rapidly evolving.
“We are a publisher for developers that don’t need one, and I think that’s the first thing everyone needs to know: You don’t need one,” Nigel Lowrie, of Devolver Digital, told TheeGame. “Once you’ve established that, I think everything else becomes a lot easier, because what you’re going to find out is that there’s things a publisher can do to make your life easier, bring your game to a wider audience and ultimately maybe make your game better.”
Devolver Digital is the publisher behind Broforce, Hotline Miami and Shadow Warrior, among others. Devolver is a small company — Lowrie joked that recently adding a sixth member to their team increased their size by an alarming 20 percent — that has found great success in publishing independent games, but the words “publishing” and “independent” in that sentence may be misleading; people argue about what each word means in the modern industry
“I’m not even going to say a publisher because that term is totally changing. There’s indies publishing other indies. There’s individuals publishing games. There’s publishers publishing games, and there’s people not using publishers at all, and all of them have worked,” Lowrie explained.
This is the new world of publishing, and in many ways the balance of power has slipped. It’s a buyer’s market for developers, and they’re “hiring” publishers for services instead of relying on them for access or cash. You may not need a publisher, but there are services for which you may be willing to pay.
The rules have changed
Developers are in the business of making and selling games, and the time spent on business is time that is not spent creating a game. You’re not creating content if you’re dealing with taxes, if you’re negotiating with Valve for Steam access or Sony about bringing your game to their platform. This is where the modern publisher comes in; they can take care of the business aspect of game development, freeing you up to be creative.
“We have to prove our worth”
“Vlambeer does not need us to publish Luftrauser by any means. That’s coming to PC and PlayStation. They’ve prepared games for both. They’re very well known, they’re very active, they’re very good at what they do. They’re with us because we free them up to work,” Lowrie said.
“I mean they have another game technically under early access right now. And I’m not sure, you’d have to ask [Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail], but I don’t know how excited they would be to work on two full games at the same time launching so close to each other if it weren’t for a partner like us,” he continued.
“So I think, like I said, they don’t need us. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship in the purest sense I think, and if there’s other people out there that can do that, that’s great, because I think there’s a lot of people that could probably use some help.
“I played Samurai Gunn a year ago at a party at [Spelunky creator] Derek Yu’s house,” Temkin told TheeGame. “I just totally fell in love with it.”
He asked creator Beau Blyth for a build of the game, and began to show it around at parties and industry events. The game “ruined the party” and drew a huge crowd during a cookout filled with developers and friends from Microsoft’s gaming division. Serious folks began asking Temkin to connect them with Blyth to publish, or in some way invest in, the game.
“The game was so small it didn’t need all the services of a console publisher, it didn’t need to be a third-party title for PlayStation for him to finish it,” Temkin explained. The two men came to an agreement.
Temkin gave Blyth a relatively modest amount of cash to finish the game, and then began to help with website construction and the paperwork needed release the game across multiple platforms. He hired Phil Tibitoski of Young Horses fame to help with the project, which allowed Tibitoski to quit his job and work in gaming full time, which aided in the release of Octodad.
Temkin described his work on Samurai Gunn as “a lot of paperwork and business stuff.”
“I just called it a publisher because people knew what a publisher was, I don’t know if I technically in a publisher relationship. I didn’t profit from the game at all,” Temkin explained.
He paid Blyth’s living expenses and supported the game both before and during release, and in return he took 50 percent of revenue until his initial investment was paid off. The rewards weren’t monetary.
“It’s not totally selfless, I got to learn how this stuff works,” he explained. Blyth himself was also an IGF design finalist, which meant his game had a guaranteed spot on Steam. As publisher of the game, this means that Temkin’s next title would also find a home on Steam, a slot which carries tremendous value.
Temkin also learned exactly what it takes to publish and release a game. “I’m pretty dumb, and I figured it out. If that’s what you’re paying a publisher for, just to do all the logistics, that’s nothing,” Temkin said. “That’s certainly not worth a percentage of your game.”
This situation helps to prove the value of a publisher, even if they don’t consider themselves as taking that role. Samurai Gunn earned, according to Temkin, a year’s worth of living expenses for Blyth in its first day of availability. The game was a success, and having well-known industry figures such as Temkin and Tibitoski helping with promotion and release provided tangible benefits outside of the monetary investment.
Other studios have begun moving into this business as well. “We see a lot of other publishers right now who are trying to redefine themselves. What might be different from their motive and our motive is … I used to be part of a publisher, and used to run an office in South Korea, and I noticed that literally all of the developers there, they all own their own IP, but beside that, they’re all their own publishers. That’s how its been for the past 10 years,” Double Fine’s Justin Bailey said.
“There’s seeds of that now in the indie community. If you look where games are just in general, there’s an opportunity for that to happen in the States. Some publishers, they’re trying to set up indies or other developers to be co-dependent with them. Our approach is the opposite,” he continued. “We want to share information, not hoard information, be transparent and help indies to be indie. That means letting them maintain complete creative control and having a flexible arrangement where if we’re adding value, we want to be associated [with them]. But as soon as you think you can get away from us and do it on your own, we’re very happy with us. That’s not a failure for us, that’s a success.”
Double Fine has certainly released a stack of games, and they know their way around what it takes and how to make that process run smoothly. That sort of knowledge is portable, and could benefit other studios going through the process for the first time. It turns out the skills and knowledge needed to make you a successful indie studio also translate into the necessary requirements of being an indie publisher.
What you want, and what you’ll pay
These stories all assume a few things, including the idea that you don’t need financial help up front to finish your game, and you have a product in which publishers see sales potential. Things change if you require money up front, and you’ll likely be asked to give up more of your revenue or potentially ownership of the property itself.
True independence comes at a price, and it’s often paid for with time.
“I actually started out as basically a straight-up programmer for Dungeons of Dredmor. I was a programmer. Now, I’m lucky, on any given month, I’m lucky if I get to do 50 percent programming. Now my job mostly is studio directing and publishing stuff and design,” Daniel Jacobson of Gaslamp Games told TheeGame. He was never interested in working with a publisher, but that meant his role had to change.
“I think that a lot of people, or I would suspect that a lot of people who develop indie games, don’t allocate that amount of time to doing publishing. Maybe they’re just better at it than I am, but it could be that they’re just not interested in it. And for those people, maybe publishing does make sense because you really do have to take on a lot of that,” he explained.
“I mean, making video games and getting them to hundreds or thousands or millions of people is hard.”