(Sorry I haven't quoted most of your post here, I find once an debate has got to split quotes it's easy for someone like me to fall into the trap of endless nitpicks rather than broader arguments, I hope I've at least mentioned enough of what I'm responding to, to be followable)
Treblaine said:
Not really.
I meant for the publisher+studio model they only get a percentage of the money after all the costs/expenses, so of the profits. I suppose semantically the current model the Development Studio can only possibly get 20% of the profits, compared to iOS App Store where developers get 70% of the raw revenue. Sure they have the costs to absorb, but I'll get onto that.
Compared to say Minecraft where 100% of the money you pay (bar taxes) as revenue goes directly into Notch's bank account.
It's interesting looking at the breakdown of the cost of consoles games, what slim margins they make. Publishers sell the discs to retailers at only about $36 per unit (Pachter interview) then they are hit with a $10-12 licence fee per disc from Microsoft/Sony for the royalty of releasing a game on their system, the cost of the box + disc + manual ($3) and other per-disc costs. In the end, Notch makes about as much per sale of Minecraft as Activision makes per sale of each COD game.
That's pretty cool to know actually, thanks for the info. The minecraft model of course is not workable in any real form for the majority of distributions, if only because Minecraft got the equivalent of several million pounds of publicity absolutely free. Developers of merely good to average indie games don't have news site after news site linking to the place where people can buy their game and at the very least would have to rely on a place where people would naturally go to buy a game.
The real thing about Minecraft though is that Notch made money without money, something that is normally impossible to do. He just stumbled on the dream of something which costs almost no money to make and that everyone wants to pay lots of money for. Most other ideas take money to make and then make a little bit more, and that's the way it works for most games.
He's also in the situation where he can safely make other games without running out of capital.
The reason we need publishers is otherwise the system is too brutal. Take your Bioware example. Yes Bioware can probably make enough money off each game so they can afford to make their next game. But 1) Is the money available at the right time? Money coming in from games is pretty erratic and any delay in a game schedule that pushes a game overbudget would mean that even though the game will still easily make it's money back when released it doesn't have the money now. Which means it needs a hefty loan, which means it needs investment. Which means the people investing in it feel like they should be assured the job will be done well. And once inverstors are putting in millions, you've basically got a publisher again.
IE if Valve and Blizzard didn't have Steam and WoW in a publisherless world they'd go out of business before their next game gets released.
2) What if they make a game that is less succesful? I don#t even mean a bad game, just one that's less successful. If Bioware make a game for £10 million and receive £15 million in return that's still not enough money to make their next game. If they make a Jade Empire it's all over. Whereas a publisher can see the talent (or else another publisher will and swoop in on it) and say, okay Dragon Age 2 wasn't as good but if you've got this fantastic track record so we'll give you the money you need to make another game.
You're also placing too much hope in digital distribution. You said it yourself, the disc and box and stuff only costs $3. It's chicken feed. DD will bring many brilliant revolutions to the industry and hopefully more flexible pricing systems, but it won't change the need for investment and security. The thing is that most of the DD games at the moment have indie inclinations, where the whole point is they're smaller budget and manage to avoid the reaches of a publisher.
And you're ideas on how to avoid risk aren't long term feasible. Like selling a game in it's alpha, we've already gone over how the only 1 in a million example success story hasn't even managed to raise funds to make a big budget game. And that's with an alpha game which is playable, something that's rare in itself.
Same with selling something for nothing and upgrading. To get to that stage you've got to have a game. To have a game (unless you're Notch) you have to pay peoples wages whilst they make it. To pay peoples wages you need an investment. For an investment you need a...
When I said publishers absorb risk I didn't mean they fund risky things. No a publisher always will try to minimise risk. I'd take a fifty fifty bet with a fifty pence, but not with a fifty pound note. I meant risk purely in terms of having a £50 million debt on your head and the risk of losing that money.
I agree it's bad the publishers close developers that fail, and in a sense that's pretty bad. But in the end those people go and get new jobs. If they've got talent and the industries got space they will, if they can't find jobs it's because they aren't quite good enough or the industry has shrunk because people haven't got money to spend on games. They will have been paid for there time spent on a game and have opportunities to continue working. They've lost nothing but the next job and of course the huge discomfort of trying to find a new one, particularly if the industry has shrunk (but then someone is going to lose a job whatever happens). They haven't lost money in that deal. Whereas a publisher had 10 million in it's bank, somewhere a group of people put up 10 million of cash and now they are 10 million poorer. They've lost a lot more financially than the developer. That's what I mean by risk. If the developer took the risk then even they'd start of rich and make themselves jobless and poor if things go bad or they'd start of moderately rich and end up in debt with no way to pay it off.
And your ideas for cheap marketing, like releasing a good free demo. Well that's not enough. People have to know that demo exists. People have to be convinced that demo is worth trying. If everyone is doing this, isntead of a one off, it's not news and doesn't get reported. No-one finds out about the existence of the demo. Even putting a demo together can take a lot of time and money investment. What if your game doesn't demo well? A story based game is hard to demo without it being a loooong demo. A game with complicated mechanics that build up gradually doesn't demo well because you either start off with simple mechanics that aren't special, or difficult mechanics that the player isn't sufficiently familiar with.
And even Halo 3, remember that Yahtzee story? About how Guiness decided to stop advertising because everyone knows what Guiness is and St Patricks day exists? And then Guiness didn't end up selling much that year? It's hard to realise how much more informed we are about most people. The majority of CoD player didn't realise Modern Warfare 2 was a sequel to Modern Warfare 1 until the marketing department stuck the CoD prefix back on it. And to get to the point where you can sell a brand you need to spend a lot of marketing on the initial brand.
Free-to-play is a good model. But it's not necessarily 100% developer. To do something free-to-play you need to have a game to have a game you need...
League of Legends was funded by venture capitalists to the tune of 20 million dollars before it was released. You can bet those people are taking a hefty cut and were watching to make sure their investment was secure.
Finally AAA games that managed to do it without a publisher. You mentioned the Witcher 2. Interestingly enough it turns out that CD Projekt are actually a videogame publisher that decided after 8 years of publishing games they'd turn some resources to developing their own too. CD Projekt RED STUDIO are essentially are an in house developer for the publishing company CD Projekt. I just never heard about it before because they were focussed on Poland.
I don't know enough about Hard Reset but wikipedia says it's got mixed reviews and a couple of those explicitly state they feel the game didn't have enough funding to be the game it should have been
It's an upstarting developer so they have to have got money from somewhere so either the founders were insanely rich or they're paying off a hefty loan to someone.
Hawken is a brilliant case in your point. Small indie developer making a class game.
In the end, in weird sense I don't think we're disagreeing. (Well not as much as we might think) I agree that publishers bring about flaws, that great games can be made without publishers and some truly brilliant things can be done with some clever marketing and pricing.
The trick here is "all" I don't believe that all great games can be made without publishers and that all brilliant things can be done with clever marketing and pricing.
But the way I see it. Publishers don't actually hurt anything. The point of all your methods is that they don't need publishers. So if a studio is doing those things, a publisher shouldn't be involved in the first place to hinder them. But this also means the publishers time and money is available to be spent on other brilliant games. Meaning that we have more brilliant games!
A developer only comes under the thrall of a publisher voluntarily. They choose to sign a contract and make a deal. There have been some nasty cases where a developer has made an unwise choice or taking things on faith that the publisher was too nefarious to take on faith, but the truth is most of the time a developer and a publisher only hook up when they feel things can be mutually beneficial.
There can only be so many Minecraft at a time. Brains and info can only be passed so far. I'm not saying we should get rid of it, no we should embrace it! But at the same time we have Minecraft we can also have FiFA. The two can co-exist because they're so radically different. We don't need publishers for everything, but they can be good for some things.
To sum up I feel this analogy is best, since Peter Jacksson published District 9. District 9 was a great film that did fantastic things on a small budget and found new ways to bring quality without a publisher and it was a great film. The Lord of the Rings was a big budget masterpiece that needed a publisher so much it took the publisher the risk of desolation to get it onto the big screen. They're both great films and the world is better for both of them, neither one could have worked with the others system. The one was too risky for a publisher to take on, the other to expensive for an indie.
Lets have both
(I'm Welsh/British btw)
