WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN PUBLISHER SERVICES?

- Do you have a lawyer to back up your statements? If not, then how can we hold you accountable for your end of the deal?

- Do you have a publishing company established? Or are you putting your own bank on the line in case any legal issues come up later?

- Give us some numbers. Saying you have a following tells us nothing. Prove to us that the following is substantial enough to take a risk on you.

- Do you have connections to journalists who pay attention to RM games?

- How do we know Save Your Mother wasn't just a fluke? How can you prove that you can CONSISTENTLY gain exposure for anyone looking to partner with you?

- Since you won't be a beta tester, do you have access to people who are willing to work QA for you? Or will you be unable to guarantee the stability of games you publish under your name? A game-breaking bug near the middle and end of a game will reflect very poorly on your services and dissuade others from looking to you.

- "Paid advertisements?" That is the exact opposite of what a publisher is supposed to do. You're already taking 10% of revenue. That's incentive enough for you to do your best to market the game. Putting the full extent of a publishing services behind a paywall is a declaration that you will not do your best to market games.

- Do you plan on continuing game development on your own? If so, how can we be sure games you publish won't get sidelined or forgotten while you go off working on your own projects?



I'm not against you doing this. In fact, I think it's a neat idea. However, there's a LOT more that goes into publishing than what you cover here. A solo dev marketing their own games is almost a full time-job in itself, and you're proposing to do that kind of work for anyone who wants to partner with you.

author=Tuomo_L

Give us some numbers. Saying you have a following tells us nothing. Prove to us that the following is substantial enough to take a risk on you.

I don't understand the question.

Well, for one, saying that you sold your game in 63 countries is not very reassuring. For all we know, each of those 63 countries could account for one purchase each.

Was your game a highly successful investment that can maintain operations as a business on a monthly basis, or did you get sudden influxes from Steam sales (the only time many small developers see their games sell at all)? Because there's a big difference.

You can say your game was successful because it the sales exceeded its budget, sure. My game did, too, but that's because my game had a very small budget. So that doesn't really tell us anything.

author=Red_Nova
- Do you have a lawyer to back up your statements? If not, then how can we hold you accountable for your end of the deal?

The current DMCA law is extremely powerful. You can easily issue DMCA takedown notices if the publisher fails to comply with your agreement. You'd need to get a lawyer to recoup your losses (unless you have a hit game, that probably isn't worth it) but you can at least force Steam and other digital marketplaces to remove your IP.

EDIT:

Toumo, you have 2 games released on Steam (edit 2: excuse me, 3 games, one of which is free but also only 170ish reviews at 66% positive); one of which has only received 21 reviews at 61% positive since 2015, and the other has received only 4 since August. I don't think I'm being argumentative or condescending in noticing that it seems like you're not promoting your own games very well. Degica and Aldorlea take a bigger cut, but they also have a proven track record and a much bigger audience.

Based on your current games, I would strongly encourage anyone that wants to publish on Steam to not go through you until you've proven yourself. For aspiring developers, yes, publishing to Steam can be a hassle, and marketing is too. But if you're serious about what you're doing, it's worth taking the time to either learn yourself, or to get hooked up with a "real" publisher. And I mean no disrespect by saying that Tuomo, but I see your offer as irresponsible in its current state.

I'm just seeing way too many "ifs" in your proposal and responses, and dodging questions with "I know things and have done things." It's not enough to just propose the theoretical things you COULD do, when you have no track record of successfully having done something like this previously. Who can vouch for you?

I'm going to be honest with you: Even if your intentions are good, it's coming off as very sketchy. And you DON'T want to go into something like this with people second-guessing.

EDIT: I do want to make it clear that I'm not trying to discourage you from eventually doing something like this. But please remember that these are other peoples' games we are talking about, and clients are going to want to confidently say that their game is in good hands.

I take back what i said sorry and thank you.

author=Tuomo_L
Yes, I have a lawyer and can do a legal contract with them. It's actually what I was going to do, but I was asking people for opinions first.

Of course I'd make a legal document that'd make us both accountable, for both our protection and to hopefully prevent any disputes.

This is good news. You've put a lot of my fears to rest with your first statement. However, I'd recommend lawyering up before opening up the doors to the public.

Give us some numbers. Saying you have a following tells us nothing. Prove to us that the following is substantial enough to take a risk on you.

I don't understand the question.

Sgt. took the words out of my mouth. Go back and read his post on this.

One thing I need to add (and for the love of god PLEASE don't take this as me rubbing it in your face, as that's not my intention at all!) is that a random joe like me has a larger Twitter following than both your personal and gamedev accounts combined. Social media is a powerful means of exposure, and a strong social media presence is practically a requirement for publishers. The lack of any real social media presence really doesn't give me much confidence that you can do a publishing job well without strong connections.

Obviously, I'm not saying Twitter followers are the be all/end all for exposure, but you're trying to sell yourself as a publisher, and I'm having a hard time verifying that on my end.

I have some connections but honestly, nothing out of the ordinary.

What is "out of the ordinary" to you? For me, I have very few connections outside of Degica, and I imagine the startup indie has far fewer. Do you have three connections? Four? A hundred?

Strangers of Power sold back its budget within two days and I expect it to also reach just as widespread salels as Save Your Mother (I see a lot of people wishlist, probably waiting for Christmas Sales). Adventures of Dragon already has tons of people put it on wishlist in preparation for the early access. Say what you want about my games, but I am able to consistently make back what they cost me so I know how to turn my games into proffit.

Fair enough! I agree that the specific sales numbers is confidential, so I'll take you at your word when it comes to budgets. However, I wasn't talking about budgets. I was talking about exposure.

Of course, I can't absolutely guarantee exposure, it's always the same as with any form of a market even if you'd go solo, there will always be chance that your game will not sell well. It'd be literally a lie for anyone to say that they guarantee great sales, absolutely nothing can gurantee that, not even the super huge publishers can.

However, this would increase the chance of said exposure happening a lot more as you add in more factors that allow people to discover said games by either bundles, sale events or such and in this dynamic fashion, your product gets far more visibility as it'll be seen statistically far more than if they'd not be included in any other place but the regular storefront.

If people see a bundle with all the games and sees "Oh, I am missing one more game from my collection and I get 10% off the game's price if I buy it" they'll have a far higher chance of buying the game.

Everything you said here is true. Which is why you really need to show people that it's better to team up with you than to try it on their own.

Do you not have any testers yourself? It's usually not the publisher's job to provide all the testers for the project. Game studios usually have their own inside testing too, not just the publishers. You really shouldn't have to rely all your testing just on me.

I am just one man, I can't do literally everything. I will help as much as I can but it'd be a bit uncalled for to tell me to play through every game, especially if there's many of them or they're really long.

No, no, no, I wasn't suggesting you do literally everything! You're absolutely right in that it would be literally impossible for one guy to do QA on top of publishing! What I'm saying is that you need to establish that games published under your name have a certain level of quality.

Before Remnants of Isolation was published by Degica, the game was given to a couple of testers (and I admit I'm unsure if they were in-house testers for Degica or contracted by them) to run through the game, making sure there weren't any critical bugs.

While I admit that I only have that one experience to draw from, I think it absolutely is a publisher's job to ensure that games published under their names meet a certain level of quality. Say what you will about EA, but you know that their library of published titles in general (because I know someone will try to take this statement out of context) meet a certain level of quality that you won't see from some random asset-flipper hobbling together a Unity project in 3 hours.

If you don't have the connections to testers and would rather trust the developers to do their own QA, that's fine. However, understand that you run the risk of terrible games and devs smearing your name with garbage titles. Because of that, I think it's natural to want to invest some form of effort into verifying the game's quality at the very least.

"Paid advertisements?" That is the exact opposite of what a publisher is supposed to do. You're already taking 10% of revenue. That's incentive enough for you to do your best to market the game. Putting the full extent of a publishing services behind a paywall is a declaration that you will not do your best to market games.

What?

I meant paid advertisements as in, buying ad space on Facebook and Google Adwords.

I have played with them before and can help organize good and succesful ad campaigns that are suitable for the budget.

Okay, I'll admit that I don't know the workings of Facebook ads and the like, but I think my statements still stand. If you're taking a percentage of a game's revenue, wouldn't you want to do your absolute best to ensure that it sells well, including these paid ads?

If this gets really popular, I'll hire helpers as I said. Right now, I am only one person so some stuff will be limited at start.

Understandable. However, that's where those connections I talked about earlier come in. I know you're just one guy, so you need to prove that you know enough people to give the game the exposure it deserves. Frankly, I think you'll need a few extra hands right out of the gate.

I understand your concerns, I really do. Many bad folks have tried to take advantage of RPG Maker users in the past, just few years ago on RPG Maker Web there was a big scam about people claiming they wanted to publish games but that came out bogus.

I also understand the warranted worry that I wouldn't be able to keep up with all of the extra work, which is why I would obviously limit the number of deals I'd take at a time, for starters. It would make sense too, so that I could better focus on each by case by case basis and then, like I said, if I get burried in the work, I'll hire a helper.

If this gets really much attention and starts really making all of us involved nice proffits, I will of course focus more into the publishing and may even become mainly publisher, rather than developer at that point.

Let me make it clear right now that I'm not accusing you of trying to take advantage of inexperienced devs. However, looking at the intial pitch and your responses, it seems to me that you are grievously underestimating the amount of work a publisher has to do.

My recommendation: Start small. Don't worry about a publishing business right now until you have the cash and connections to really get a foot in the market. Focus on partnering with individuals rather than opening yourself up as a business. Gain some experience, make some connections, and build up your brand as a good marketer (not just as a game dev) until you have a palpable presence.

I just watched the trailers for all 3 of your games on steam and they are pretty... bad...

A trailer should be engaging and exciting but these are about as dull and uninspired as trailers get. They look and sound just like every other RPG Maker game on Steam (and the RTP doesn't help matters).

Did you make these yourself or did you farm them out to some sort of trailer company?

author=Red_Nova
Exposureis the name of the game here, and publishers guarantee exposure, which will likely result in more sales.

I'm just gonna say there are a lot of devs I don't want to see exposed and I don't care if that's "slut shaming" or whatever, but your nakedness should have no relation to the game you're selling. #hottake

(Unless the game you're selling is one of those strip puzzle games in which case I don't know why you'd just give out the goods like that.)