Any Advice for a New Game Publisher?

Hi there!

I'm planning to start publishing games from other Brazilians indie devs on Steam that can't pay the Direct fee, or just don't want to have the trouble of dealing with the PR side of things.

There's anyone here that worked as publisher, or with a publisher, that could give some advice on this business? Something I should look into, etc?

I would like to hear both sides to have a better understanding of how it works, and learn the best way to work as a publisher.

I'm not a publisher, but the most critical problem for any publisher is quality control.
you cannot accept games of low quality that will never sell enough to pay for your costs - this will happen often enough with games where you misjudged the interest even if they had good quality, you can't have that happen too often due to lack of quality control.

And that means you'll have to check each game carefully before accepting to publish it, and your fee/percentage needs to be high enough not only to recuperate your costs (like the steam fees) but also to cover your work time in quality control and the occasional case where the estimated sale numbers didn't happen.

Hmm... How much game publishers usually asks for their fee?

That info is often hidden in an NDA I'm afraid. However, I saw one book publisher who posted the fees online for anyone to see, and they asked for 20%. Not sure if you can use the same idea for games though.

The problem is also that the percentage needs to be taxed, so it is different for different countries.
And never forget that steam also takes a fee of every copy sold.

Edit:
And it also depends on who does the marketing - if the publisher pays for the advertisements, that also needs to be added to the fees.

That sort of pulbishing is hard to pull off as often you as a publisher need money to do the hardest thing... marketting the game. Just publishing at Steam is not enough. Depending on the quality you build for your brand, you might be looking at few dollars here and there, or actually profitable and long-running publishing relationship.

As Andar stated, quality control is the key to build a reputation for you as a publisher. To have quality games, you need to offer something to devs that they wont have, as usually only 100 dollar fee to steam does not make a dev who has put hours upon hours to share a game percentage. You can offer a community which will 100% play your game? You can offer a marketting campaign, which usually frustrates any devs.

I think your plan is possible, but the value you have to offer has to be high in order to attract quality games to your rooster.

100% is nearly impossible! :guffaw: But yes, I have build some interest, made some contacts and earned experience on indie marketing during over 3 years of work. Of course, compared to other game publishers that are working for a long time, I'm still a small fry, but I believe that I can ease the pain of many devs when it comes to effectively publishing the game on Steam. :smile:

You can't ask 20% royalty for yourself when your name carries no weight, that's a HUGE percentage to give away. Anything above 20% is you being scammed, regardless of the publisher.

As someone who's published games, I can tell you that the most important thing you need is written contracts. You need to state how the royalty is shared, how the taxes and such expenses are handled and so on. You also have to also specificy if it's international and on more than Steam service and if this means exclusivity or not.

no, it is not - it depends on a lot of things including what the publisher does. If he handles marketing and other options for you and is a well-known and respected publisher, then even 40% would be cheap for getting on with that publisher.

You can't just focus on how much money the developer gets. Yes, giving away 40% to the publisher would leave you with a very minor part left of the income (especially considering that steam also requires a share if the publisher doesn't have its own distribution, but then steam-publisher rarely get or demand those 40%, that is usually for the other big publisher who don't go through steam and don't have to share with steam as well).

If you get on with one of the really big non-steam publisher then such a share might not be able to get you much for your game, but it will drastically increase your reputation for your next games. And that is worth more than that larger share.

A publisher that does nothing but put you on steam on the other hand, in such cases 20% would be high.
But a blanked accusation that everything above 20% for the publisher is a scam is simply proof that that person doesn't have any idea of what a good publisher can do.

No, 40% is ludicrous and anyone who has charged you that much is being a greedy son of goat and you shouldn't do business with them ever. That's literally more than the biggest, most well known publishers of the world charge. It's more than Sony, Nintendo or Microsoft charge.

I suppose if your game's expected sales is 100 copies and they spent 100k $ on marketing it... They can probably expect more than 20%.
Oh and some also take 100% before their costs are fully compensated.

@Tuomo L false. I guess you've never sold retail before. The normal for any retailer is 55%. And even Amazon usually takes 55% of anything they publish regardless of whether it is digital or a physical item.

And it can even be worse than that too. I have a coworker who wrote a book. The publisher took all the money from the first 700 sales. After that he got 6%. That was it.

what people are forgetting here is that every merchant needs to double the price in order to make ends meet after tax, storage cost, helper wages and so on. So if some merchant buys something for 10$, he needs to sell it for 20$ or he won't be able to live from the results. And that goes for every step in the sale sequence.
A book is sold to a printing house, the printing house usually sells it to a wholesaler, the wholesaler sells it to the retail merchant and then the customer buys it. Which means of the final price, the retail merchant needs around 50%, the wholesaler around 25%, the printing house 12.5% and that leaves 6.25% for the author.

The author can only get more if he can shorten the sale sequence, because everyone has to pay their taxes and costs and still needs to get enough money to eat and live from it. But if the author goes directly to the customer, he also misses out on marketing campaigns and the like, and a lot of the retail merchants only buy from wholesaler, they won't buy from independent printers for a lot of reasons...

Retail price is not same as the actual price, retailers sell the product for more also to make up the difference. That Amazon thing is actually incorrect and I have no idea where you pulled that number from https://developer.amazon.com/support/legal/da

55% is outrageous, that's literally giving away majority ownership of the game to the publisher.


That's a really bad publisher to put that much money into project with that small return. Anyone doing deals like this would be out of business within a year. I don't know what your point is because even if they'd take 100% that's only 100$, they would still be idiots for pissing away 100k$ into a small niche game with little public interest.

Seriously, I sell far more games than that with chump change much less 100k budgets.

I got my percent from the Amazon publishing site, and it does depend a little on the product, as the way Amazon does it is if your price is too low, they take a higher percentage to make sure they are covering their costs. For the book I published with them, if I charged only $18.93, I'd get nothing, as the publisher was going to take all of it to cover print and distribution costs. So it can be even higher than 55% depending on what you charge.

Edit: Here is the link to a publisher that is owned by Amazon. You can enter in the pages and the price, it tells you the take you get. No NDA to this one. https://www.createspace.com/Products/Book/#content6

We're talking about games, not books. I literally linked how apps receive royalties on Amazon.

But the ideas are the same. And nite books have been around longer and learned more. Why do you think many publishers go under? It's because they refused to learn the lessons all other distributions taught us.

Plus with apps you can see for yourself how little quality control there is. A publishers name needs to mean something and usually those who charge more the name means more. Otherwise if the name means nothing then we should never get a publisher and just all self publish as it is now no longer worth the cost

The point is - it depends on the developer, and the publisher. Small indie going for big publisher would be happy to ask for any money at all. Also I think 100% before the costs are covered is pretty much the norm for most serious publishers.

It really is not though. I don't know what sort of publishers you've worked with but that really is not the norm.

Exactly. Name of publisher and how well they do their job means everything. If I publish through noname Joe and they take 10% of sales of a $10 game which sells 1000 copies with them I end up with 1000 * 0.10 = 900 (assuming no other fees here, which is I know unrealistic, but since Steam fees are under NDA we have to leave them out).

But if you publish with a big name publisher who takes 50% but your $10 game now sells 10,000 copes, you made 10000 * 0,5= $5,000. It's a better deal for you and them in the long run.

@Tuomo L: I don't know what publishers you have worked with in the past, but it IS the norm. Maybe not for games due to digital distribution and few use quality control these days, but it is the norm for everything else under the sun that I checked. In fact, some book publishers make you buy 1,000 copies of your own book before they will take the job, and it is up to you to sell those first 1,000. If you don't, tough luck.

And honestly, 90% of those game publishers you have mentioned I'd never use. Why? No quality control. They are associated with publishing garbage, so any game I publish with them is just lost in the sea of the other garbage out there.

In fact, Steam is almost to that point too. Too bad there isn't a realistic alternative at the moment (gog rejects almost every RPGMaker game as they can), but if one ever existed I bet many would flock to it and publish under that instead.