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Is there much interest in getting your game published with low fees and you retain the rights? Yes this includes FPSC.

I plan on doing this for indie devs only but I wish to get some feedback first

There are already a bunch of professional online publisher available like Gamersgate (has a few FPSC games listed already) so you will be going up against fierce competition. This is not something you should do if you are not willing to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers and servers. Paperwork and hosting isn't cheap if done right and for publishers it needs to be done right.

We are not in it for competition. We are in to make money just as well as the Big three are. I am one to believe if you put your game with one publisher then you do not want to make the money. That is my belief. My partners may have different outlooks. But the fact is this we charge 10-15% per sale. You keep all rights to your game. Essentially as stated before, the more places you have your game at, the more sales you have, but that is just me I could be wrong.

That just doesn't make any sense at all. Business in the game publishing market is filled with competetion. Failure to realise this is a road to doom. If you cannot devote millions of dollars into business development, support and marketing then stay out of such a market. People will not just flock to you because you open a new game portal. It takes years of hard work to be competitive in shark filled waters.

One other thing: how do you expect to make any money if you only charge 10-15% per sale? I promise you that you cannot run a business on margins that low. Money transactions alone will easily cost you 5-10% of the full sale and then comes any wages, legal papers, marketing, servers and bandwidth etc. There's a reason why most puplishers charge 30-40% (some take way more).

It should be the other way around, trying to make your game number one...




-Massap2

To my mind, a game publisher for an FPSC game is a waste of money.

What are the things that a game publisher will bring to the table?

Advertising. Well, they aren't going to promote a tiny indie game any more than you would as an individual. If that's the case, get some social networking sites up for the game and build a webpage.

Promotion. Some publishers will provide limited "box artwork," but you are best to spend a few dollars on spec artwork from local artists.

Downloading. The potentially high bandwidth available with a digital publisher is an important aspect, but in truth a small indie game won't need a lot of bandwidth... and one day if you have a zillion downloads, you'll have made enough money to easily get more bandwidth somehow. SO, again I'd say host the game on your own server.

Commerce. This is the most important aspect of a digital publisher because commerce is governed by laws. Still, there are many small business "commerce engines" (many using Paypal) that would be best for an indie game that will probably have limited sales.

So, in my opinion what's the verdict? Do all of these aspects on your own, and if the game becomes a smash success, then approach a publisher. Because it's had some success, they'll want your game at that point and you'll make more money because of it.

In order to make money, you need to excel or match your competition, or your customer's business will go to them.



That is true to a certain extent. Hypothetically, if your game is featured on Amazon.com, Steam, and etc, more sales are more likely. However, advertising your game on, even a hundred, free webpages made by unheard of developers that receive less than 100 visits a year doesn't guarentee more sales.

A few questions I would ask you if I were considering your services would be; what do you or your company(?) have to offer in terms of advertising and services that I (the developer) can't achieve on my own, and save myself the 10%-15%? Are you well known? Does your website/store receive heavy traffic each month? What are your average monthly sales margins? Just something to think about

Kravenwolf

Leebo - I am always looking out for new publishing opportunities but I would need waaaay more than a couple of forum posts. If you want to publish games you can't just say your publishing games - tell us what makes you qualified to do so. Have you got a website/traffic established? Would you actively promote the game through advertising?

I'd need to know answers to these and a hundred other questions before considering anyone's publishing services. Not meant as criticism, just my perspective.

One more thing I would like to add.

To me it doesn't really matter if I get 80% or only 20% for myself from a publishing deal. If the portal who gives 80% doesn't make any sales it's zero dollars for you. 20% of 10.000 sales is way better than 80% of nothing. That is why digital stores like Steam count. They have millions of users and therefore potential to actually sell something.

There are of course still potential in smaller niche portals that have a very specific set of users. If you publish something appealing to them you might have a sleeper hit.

At the end of the day you will need to publish a quality game to sell.

you can get your game on the shelves of stores if you wanted to, its plainy eaisy to do. it just takes time and a show to the store managers. People think game sells on the internet are the best way but I say no to this.

three reasons why you should never sell your games on line

1.no traffic, but in the stores plenty of traffic

2.people will steal your game, then you loose in the end. if you make your dvds or cds to where they can not put the media on the hard drive your in good for the future.Im setting this up now for my game

3.it can really be as big as game as you want it to be, there are discs that have 5 gigs on them, so holding a huge game is a benifit.no one has to download a huge game. I always buy my games at the store. I never buy them online, the only three things I have ever bought on my pc is stuff from here, stuff from iclone and some modle packs from people around here. most people dont buy online any longer due to all the theives.

how to get your rated game into stores?

1. make shure your game is fully finished, no bugs and some game testers played it all the way through. make some art for the box cover. go down to kingos and get the box printed with your art.

2.burn it to cd or dvd and put some anti theaft softwhare on it to where no one can clone it.

3.go to every store you know of that sells pc games and drop off a free coppie to every store manager in town. then if its a great game I do guarinty one of them will be calling you to put it in there stores.

I still to this day know small buisness that do this with there products. I even see there stuff in the stores shelves to. there is this backery in the town next to mine that delivers there bread every 2 weeks to some mager stores.All I am saying is anything is possible offline, you just need to put on your running shoes and do all the leg work.

Absolutely agree Scurvey Lobster - I think your bang on the money on this one. I would like to know if Leebo has identified a niche for his website...



Daniel, I'm sure it is possible to get a game on a few store shelves, particularly local stores, but it is not necessarily easy. In the case of gameshops it would be, at best, a headache for the manager to add your game unless you went through their head office first and in so doing you will come head to head against the big publishers who are competing for large amounts of shelf space. In order to get into a chain I dare say you would need to speak to a chain's buyer and convince them that your product would actually sell. You could give them the best game in the world to play but most managers/buyers won't have time to play it and even if they did, so what? Most retail customers won't have played the game in advance, how will they know it's an amazing game? If you instead pitched your game with competent artwork and packaging showing there was a market for it then, yeah, a store or store group might decide to sell it - but for them to make a significant order you'd have to show a significant amount of buzz or interest surrounding your game.

For example - you could line one shelf in your store with copies of Final Fantasy XIII which you sell for £39.99. In Britiain the retailer probably takes away about £6-8 from the sale a single copy (it's been a few years since I worked in retail so I'm not 100% sure - it's possibly as high as £9.90 if the margin reaches 25% but that's probably a bit much). A game with such a large amount of buzz, combined with advertising materials, etc, might see a single store move around 500 copies in week one resulting in around £19,995 in revenue and £4000 in profit (based on 20% margin estimate).

For a game from an independent developer with no track record or significant buzz would be a totally different proposition. First, there is likely to be no real shelf space for your game to fit on - it's certainly not going to line a single shelf with the front cover facing out. Game publishers often (though not always) have to bid or come to a specific arrangement for a prominent space at retail. If a game store did accept your game it is likley they would only take 2-3 copies which would be filed away among the mass of PC games with only the spine of the case visible to the consumer. In this case your game is in the store but it would be difficult to find even if someone knew it existed. In this kind of arrangement you could really only hope to sell copies as impulse buys for people searching for a PC bargain but even then your game will up against known and trusted brand names. But, if the game was priced well (around £5) it would fall into the impulse buy category and probably would get picked up sporadically. But in this case the gameshop has made only a tiny amount of money from your product - the question is why would they bother taking it and going through the hassle of paying you, preparing tax statements etc, for such a tiny return?

Of course you could say, why won't it be placed at that nice big "new release" stand at the front of the store? Afterall, lots more people will see it and it will likely sell far better as a result - you would certainly be right. But game retailers save this space for titles that people are looking for, titles that will sell in volume, and titles with high margin/turn over potential. Even at the front of a gameshop for one week an unknown title probably wouldn't sell many copies - IMHO you would be lucky to shift 20 copies - I've worked in an electronic retailer and though we sold a spectrum of products we also sold games and the average title wouldn't get through 20 copies in one week. I'm assuming a dedicated retail channel would move more but even then it would be £200 in revenue for a £10 game, maybe resulting in £40 profit for the store. But an extra £40 is better than nothing surely? That's not how stores will look on it - stores weigh the amount of shelfspace they have against the turnover and profitability they intend to generate. For example, if a shop has 300 metres of shelf spacing which generates a total £3,000 in a day they are going to look to make that same space generate £3,500 in the near future. If they dedicate space to a product that underperforms, and the total profit of the shelf space hits £2,500 then the underperforming product will be removed and replaced with something that make that shelf space (retail real estate) more valuable. To cut to my point - if your game is given enough room to have two covers facing out at the consumer and it generates £40 the game store would be more interested in putting up a title that would generate anything above £40 from the same space - a single that sells just 5 copies will equal the profitablity of your game and even if it doesn't sell an extra copy it has cost them less to store (fewer space required for fewer copies). If that game instead sells 10 games, just half of the number yours sold, it would double the profitability of that shelf space.



People will always steal your game. Whether you sell it at retail or online if its worth stealing people will find a way. Guys, seriously, the big companies spend serious $$$$$$$ trying to combat piracy and they've yet to find a solution that works or doesn't annoy the legitimate user. Don't get me wrong, piracy really gets me annoyed but, at the very least, it means people are interested in your product and it is not impossible to attempt to get people who pirated your software to attempt to support future releases. I actually have an (unoriginal) idea on how to do this which I might bring to the community shortly.




This is a good idea - if you really want your games in store this might very well work but you need to be realistic in your expectations. First, it is likely to be local stores only who are interested in your title - you're not going to get the volume so you're not likely to make any money. That said if I was very interested in getting local coverage I would take the game to my local paper - get them to talk about it, either in a review or a story (most local papers will probably be willing to help you out) and then take the game to the shops - tell them you got an article/feature coming in the local paper and you want to tell the newspaper which local stores will be supporting the game. If you do this the local stores might give you some serious self space as it would tie them to a local interest story and work as good local PR - they might even put the article, etc in their window, but all of this really depends upon the individual whim of the store managers. To increase my chances of success I would avoid the shops dueing busy periods but instead focus on getting the game out in the summer when the number of new releases is reduced meaning the shops are likely to be quieter and more willing to entertain this idea. It is certainly possible to get your game into some shops, but easy I don't think it is.

Daniel: that might work for your local area but for anyone making FPSC games that is a lot of work for a few sold copies. Even the best FPSC games to date have not been able to create much buzz anywhere. Online you can reach loads more people and if your game is any good it will get pirated no matter what. A CD/DVD with pirate protection does not exist.

If you have a quality game and want to go in stores the professional approach is to contact a publisher that has a history of getting games into stores. I am not talking EA or Ubisoft here but one of the small niche publishers. They release budget games and have experience in selling products that are less than AAA quality. A great way to find these publishers are by walking into local stores that have games and take a closer look at the budget priced games. They usually have the publishers name on the front or back of the cover. Another bonus is that these publishers produce professional covers and cd's that don't look like you made them yourself. Usually they have artists that can handle promotional and cover graphics for you.

edit: didn't see chidems post before after I published, but what he said...

@chidem

I never siad it would sell, I was just giving people the idea of how it works in sells. If you can get a publisher a chance and you can find one that will do all of it for you shure, Im game myself. buy if you cant, then you will have to do it yourself. Ive been a sells man for 30 years, This is the way its done. I have gone through store managers for years for difrent products and you dont always need to go to there head office.you can go to the head offices to if you think this is the better way, we have done this to. and yes, there have been games out there that have there games set up like i have now, they just dont do as good yet. I pray one day some one some where makes it possible that no one can steal your games but i do admitt its still possible even the way i set it up. its just harder to do is all. but, yes, that is what the store managers do, they meat with people all the time to sell new stuff.

@Scurvy Lobster

I think another good way to is to get your game published in a magizines world wide, Though this would take a little green, but I would pay it myself when my game is complete.

Daniel: game magazines are an ok way to go but they are read by fewer and fewer and mostly carry AAA grade games. Seeing that you've been a sales man for 30 years I better understand your views now. You have an "old school" approach to marketing products and while your methods are proven they don't exactly point towards the future in my opinion. Traditional retail stores still have a lot of customers but with the games we make in FPSC we have to accept that they cater to a niche audience and such an audience isn't reached easily in the cut-throat competition that retail is today. Online distribution presents a whole new way of reaching your audience. It's still not easy in any way but it will up your chances at least in my opinion.

@Scurvy Lobster



I did not know this, I thought like in the gaming stores where people shop for games also bought magizines to. well, what it sounds like to me is to try to find a publisher in the long run unless you like have someone with some bucks to back you.but i was not being really fair becouse My game im writing in dark basic pro.

Well I hope the best for you and your game

There are tons of sites covering indie games and even the yearly IGF contest. So lots of places to get attention if your game is good enough. Google them out once your game enters a final stage and need a mention somewhere.