Reverb: Solving The Publisher Problem

I say to iOS developers that they've tried to do something but there's just been this flood of shovel-ware to get above, and then you turn your attention to PSN and XBLA and you may launch your own game, but you don't have public relations and marketing support so the game fails. Well, now we find the development team wondering what to do next, and it's not that they're making bad games, it's that they lack the resources to take the game across the finish line.

There's four things that you need to be able to do when you launch a game: you need a good intellectual property, you have to choose the right distribution strategy, you need the right public relations, and the right marketing. If you have all four of those there's no guarantee that your game will succeed, but I guarantee that if you're missing one of those your game will fail.

Most developers can figure out the platforms they want to be on, and they know they can build the right game, but from a PR or marketing standpoint they fall down a little bit. And that's kind of why we're here... We know where we sit in the food chain. Developers are the most important people.

When we started this business we had trouble with the word "publisher", because it has such a negative connotation in the independent development community. In our conversations we try and veer away from saying publisher; we're a support mechanism for the development teams... They're shocked when they learn they get to keep the IP.

Success breeds success. The most difficult time for us was when we first started and we hadn't launched any titles. We have a long history with Trendy and the founders of Trendy, and now we have a million seller on our hands. They ultimately trusted our decisions, and we worked well with a team of really strong developers and were able to hit a million paid downloads.

It would be unjust for me to take any credit. I've walked with Jeremy and the developers for almost eight years now, and people assume that I must be really surprised by all this [success]. I'm not at all.

I'll use a music analogy. I'm not the musician; I'm the guy that makes sure the stage is put up, I make sure the advertising is out there, I make sure the radio stations have the plug about the concert, and we funnel the fans into the stadium. But at the end of the day, the developer is the performer. We give them the microphone and the audience to speak to.

That's exactly the problem. Look at what happened with Activision and Harmonix; when Activision had rolled out Guitar Hero they wanted to slide Harmonix into the corner and bring in Neversoft to work on the next Guitar Hero. But Harmonix is based in the music genre... It's not just about playing interchange with any developer you want to put in. Developers have embedded cultures, embedded love for certain kind of games, and you have to let that come out.

I think this is monumental for the independent development industry. You had Tim Schafer and Double Fine out there, but I also think you had a welling up of consumers and industry executives who are so tired of the "no, no, no" coming from the standard industry protocol of it has to be a franchise. Everybody's afraid of new IP, but Tim went out there and did it and now everybody's coming out of the woodwork and getting excited about it. I take my hat off to him - I think it's just amazing, and the kind of innovation the development community needs to keep going.

Steam, far above any of the other platforms. We really respect our relationship with Sony and Microsoft and we'll continue to support those platforms as we move forward with the title. But with the Steam, how quickly they were able to move forwards with promotions, in terms of DLC drops, our numbers on Steam were, to be honest, staggering.

With the iOS, smartphone and Facebook markets the consumer has been conditioned to want continuous updates. It's not about just dropping a game and moving on to the next project; it's about maintaining a title, listening to your community, and finding ways to offer things that will continue to excite the base. The development team at Trendy has done an unbelievable job supporting this title, and that's something other developers can learn from.

The problem is that the platforms are run by big companies like Sony and Microsoft. Take a look at the economics of an XBLA or a PSN release versus disc-based releases, you've got a $7 to $8 royalty when you ship a disc-based game to market, and that goes to Sony or Microsoft, plus marketing and things like that.

Now take a look at an XBLA or PSN title that prices out and around $10 to $15 and they take their 30 per cent, it's a lot less money for them. So how important is that digital console space for them? It's left to be said. There's money to made there, but I don't think you'll ever see it flip-flop over what they do with disc-based products.