I was thinking today about how many developers aren’t very good partners to their publishers. I think too many developers don’t look at the business aspects involved in game making.  I think this is one area, because we’ve been a publisher too, that can help potential publishers as we look forward.

A good developer should be thinking about how they can make the life of the publisher easier. Publishers have 3 major jobs:

1)       Distribution. This is the big one – getting the game in the store.

2)       Marketing. Getting people to know about the game.

3)       Support. Helping people who run into problems and building a community.

These are very expensive things.

We’re unusual as a game “studio” in that we have significant publisher infrastructure internally.

We can’t help much on distribution, that is ultimately why we have moved away from publishing games and instead working with others.  But in terms of marketing we can help a lot more than most game studios can because we have our own full time PR team that can get the word out the entire time.

But in addition, and this has to do with why selling the game directly matters too, we also take care of virtually all the technical support for the game.

For example, with PoliticalMachine.com, we aren’t just trying to sell the game, we are supporting the game both in terms of people having questions and fixing problems but in terms of distributing updates to the game. We provide the bandwidth and technology to get new versions to users. The net result is that customers end up having a much better experience with us than otherwise which in turn reflects well on our publisher.

I tend to think of the support aspect as a necessary evil that publishers end up having to pick up because most developers just don’t have the resources to do it.  But we do have the resources – the people, the IT resources, the bandwidth, and the technology.  So this is something we can bring to the table to help publishers streamline their processes, keep costs down.

What we get in return is the ability to have a much more intimate relationship with the customers and we can sell the game direct which doesn’t mean so much right after release (virtually all 1^st year revenue comes from retail NORMALLY), but makes a big difference after the game has left the retail space and we’re still left with the support for the game.