#halfthebattle

So, you made a great product, it’s polished, proficient, and amazing. However, that is just half the battle because what good is a product that no one sees? Publishing and distribution, which should have already been a consideration in your product planning is a vital element in the success of your product. In the case of game development, you must have a product platform laid out to even get the development underway. You need to know where this product will function in order to create the product in the first place and this will dictate some of your publishing and distribution options. Consider for a moment that your plan when you designed the concept was to get the project published by a third-party publisher. This creates a situation for you in that you need to build a vertical slice of your game to use as a demo for the publisher to even get the funding needed to complete the project and don’t think that just because you think your game is the next big thing that any publisher is going to feel the same way. It may be the case but even getting the concept in front of the publisher is going to be a task in itself.

You will need to find a shopping agent to get your project in front of the eyes of the decision maker and that won’t happen unless you get the agent excited about your project with concise and a near perfectly constructed pitch and proposal. Additionally, by doing this you essentially putting another plate at the profit dinner table. Let’s say though that you manage to find an agent and that the agent finds a publisher that is interested in the project. First, after picking yourself up off the floor from being knocked out due to the shock of how much you’re going to be giving away for the right to make the game you will need to dazzle them with your demo. A demo that you have had to cover all of the expenses for. A demo that you poured your life into and they may not even like it. Let’s assume for the moment that they did however for the purpose of this. The publisher is going to dictate certain aspects of the development and may even require certain platforms for the project or even demand that the distribution of your product be exclusive to their own online stores. Sure, you set out to design, develop, and release a game and at this point, you would have achieved that. However, is the finished product really what you designed or wanted it to be? Did you lose any creative control during the process? How about how much profit and ownership you gave away? So, when you think simple just self-publish, but it really is not that easy to self-publish either.

Self-publishing has its own issues to consider that can definitively make or break the success of a game. Without the big name of a publisher behind the project will anyone care that you have developed it, especially if you’re a smaller developer or if this is your studio's first project. Deciding how you will distribute the game is a paramount consideration. Sure, there are a lot of aggregators with which to distribute your project but keep in mind that each platform has pros and cons to their services. Choosing the wrong platform can destroy your chances of a critical success, and keep in mind that you will be giving up a portion of your revenue to each one of these platforms in addition to funding the development without the use of publisher funding. Self-publishing requires creative and diligent work on your part to make your project happen. Strategies for development funding will need to be looked at creatively and keep in mind that a funded game is still not guaranteed to be a profitable one. When self-publishing you will need to understand that marketing and promotion will play a huge part of your publishing and distribution strategies in actuality, an equal or better consideration.

So, what does all this mean? Should I give up now? Of course not, there is a winning combination for whatever publishing and distribution strategy you choose to take but either requires proper planning and preparation to be successful. When I started learning about Entertainment Media Publishing and Distribution, I never stopped to consider how important it was or how crucial a well thought out publishing and distribution plan was. My original thought was that I was going to watch a course on marketing and monetizing YouTube, get on the ID@Xbox program, and develop a crowdfunding campaign and surely that would be all I needed to do. However, while those are reasonable steps in decent publishing and distribution plans, that’s all they are is steps. There is a great deal more that needs to be considered to fill in the many gaps and holes in that plan. I can say that I have added those things to my plan but along the way, my plan has developed into so much more.