9 replies to this topic

[Noor]

I have a question that has been boggling my mine for a long time. When it comes to games I know there is a developer and a publisher. My question is why do most people tend to mention and prioritize publishers more than developers? IMO, developers should get the most credit as they spend years making the game. On the other hand, a publisher's job is to get a copy of the game and burn it on a CD, the only thing they do is set and watch the burning go by. I mean, if you look at most stores you see for example Doom3 -activition and not Doom3 -id software. If you go to gamespot for example you see in the overall the name of the game and right beneath it is the publisher and not the developer. It drives me nuts why publishers get the most credit, can someone please explain why?

[bladder]

It's because the publishers are the ones that actually "buy" it from the developers. So it's their property. Usually speaking, the developers get their cash no matter what. Either they get paid monthly, or the publisher buys the game from them for a hefty sum of cash, whatever. Publishers have the big budgets and nowadays games need big budgets, so the developers need the publishers for the budgets, and because relaistically speaking, developers are useless at PR (and advertising requires a lot of money as well)

It's just like the movies, it's always the publishers logo (ie: universal, WB, etc) and then the "a <insert name> file" appears, and then the cast. and you dont even see the story writers and graphic artists till the very end...

[Noor]

OK, So from what I understand, lets take doom 3 id software as an example, id software get the funds needed for the game from avtivision, and at the end activision buys the game from id software? That said, that means that idsoftware doesn't care how many copies of doom 3 sold, just because activision now owns doom 3? So the prophet made by selling doom3 actually goes to activision and not id software, or is there a certain percentage they share, just like movies?

[Francois Hamel]

Quote

IMO, developers should get the most credit as they spend years making the game.

Yeah...in a perfect world...

I think in our world, it sums up to who got the cash. It's the same thing in the more scientific domains. Research assistants, technicians are the people who are working hard and actually discover new stuff... but they don't get any credits, only the person who's in charge of putting money in get the fame.

Sucks...but... that's life :sigh:

:sigh: :sigh: :sigh: :sigh:

[Francois Hamel]

Quote

So the prophet made by selling doom3 actually goes to activision and not id software, or is there a certain percentage they share, just like movies?

really depends on the contract between the publisher and the developper. In that case, I'd say Id Software is probably getting some percentages as they are an already big player in the business. They actually do a favor to Activision by letting them sell their game which they are nearly garanteed to sell millions of copies. Also, Id licences their (costly!) game engine without going through Activision I suppose. All in all I'm pretty sure they make a lot of money as developers :)

As for small developpers, I'd say most of the time they don't make that much money because publishers don't want to take any risk at all. So if they take a risk (by choosing an unproven developer), they are gonna take all the profits, intellectual properties, etc... they'll want it all just in case its a success so they can cash in some more.

[NomadRock]

Yeah. Usually the publisher buys everything, they may even get the ip rights. You as a developer have already been compensated, and at that point it is the publisher's game, not yours. Them putting your name on it is merely a matter of respect. If you buy some textures from some guy to make your levels look better you dont have to credit him in any way in the game. Many people will, but not put them first, even though to the passing onlooker it seems as though it is the artists doing all the work. Even though it seems like publishers are evil, dont forget how much work does go into putting a title on the shelves and advertizing for it. Also remember that they are taking a huge risk in publishing as most games flop.

That said, yes, it does hurt that you put your blood and soul into a game and some other guy gets to slap their name right on top of yours.

[Noor]

now that makes some sense. thx

[bladder]

nkharrat said:

So the prophet made by selling doom3 actually goes to activision and not id software, or is there a certain percentage they share, just like movies?

Most of the prophet usually goes to teh publisher. It does depend on the contract. You usually have royalities in there as well. When the sales have reached a certain amount, then after that, you get a bigger precentage of the sales. Or you get a big bonus or something. It varies a lot.

Using id as an example is probably not the best though. Cause id is one of hte last developers (are they *the* last?) that can actually define their own contract with a publisher as they want it. usually, the publisher is doing the developer a favour. With id, they do the publishers a favor...

[TheNut]

There are some companies that both develop and self-publish games, but they’re mostly simple companies like Popcap and Garage Games.

Looking at the history of video games, most people in the past self published their own work. Origin (creators of the ultima series) both developed and self published their older games. Sierra use to be heavy in development working on the King’s Quest, Police Quest, Space Quest, and other games; all self-published. John Carmack self published his Wolfenstein and Quake under ID as he was starting out.

The difference between then and now is a high set of standards from the market that you must fulfill if you want to sell volumes of your game. I could write a book just describing some of the things you would need to program in any certain game (which has already been done by others =). Those would just be the “features”. That wouldn’t even touch actual game components such as special effects or interaction/plot/evolvement. Now if you’re starting from the ground up, you have a serious amount of work to do. Most developers feel it’s their duty to reinvent the wheel, so they go about writing everything on their own. This requires a tremendous amount of resources, so here comes the need for a Publisher. Someone to fork the bill and feed the pigeons.

I believe as software engineering matures (possibly within this century or thereafter) people will start to see developers self-publish their work more often. Rather than have multiple game engines like Unreal, Quake (or now Doom), Monolith, Garage Games, etc..., we’ll see complete packages from something like DirectX – free of charge. Thus eliminating a large amount of required time and costs associated with engine development & QA.

[NomadRock]

It's quickly getting there, but we only got OpenGL out of need from Archetectural programs that did not change as quickly as games, and we only got DirectX because microsoft didn't like that they couldn't own OpenGL.

What we need is for game engines to mature to a point when an engine from 3 years ago is still good. Then we will see more stable opensource engines with good use of standards. This will become like OpenGL. Then of course Microsoft will make a unified game engine optomized for XBox 4 and useable only with DirectX and we will have yet another problem. Oh well.