Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

The List of Indie-Friendly Publishers, 2017 Edition

Published on 25th October 2017 by admin | Comments Off

I put together a list of indie-friendly publishers back in 2014 as I was pitching them on Guild of Dungeoneering.  I'm now once again shopping for a publisher for our second game so I've put together a new and updated list! I hope it helps anyone else looking.

My goal like last time is to find a publisher that can help promote & market our game (and front the money to do so), and on top of that this time I'm also looking for someone who will co-fund development. This is for a PC & console game, so mobile-only publishers have not been included. There's also a couple here that would be money-only rather than a regular publishing arrangement, like the Indie Fund and Jonathan Blow's offer.

Thanks to the everyone who helped me put this list together. If you have any suggestions to add to this list feel free to mail or tweet me!

Exciting Times at PAX South

Published on 11th February 2015 by Colm | Comments Off
There's an entire separate hall to queue in

There's an entire separate hall to queue in at PAX

Two weeks ago I was able to attend my first ever PAX, which is a massive and beloved consumer gaming show. The kind that attracts real gaming fans who will happily give up their weekend, pay for tickets, and queue in their thousands to be the first ones into the show. The kind that sells out of tickets on a regular basis. Just attending would have been extremely interesting to me but I had the opportunity to do something even more incredible: I was able to showcase the game I'm working on to thousands of potential fans. WOW. Read on for my full postmortem.

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The List of Indie-Friendly Publishers

Published on 2nd September 2014 by Colm | 2 Comments

That's not an oxymoron! While the whole point of being 'indie' is to be independent (primarily of a publisher!) there are many other ways a publisher can help you while letting you remain independent. Traditionally game publishers would pay an upfront fee that paid for a studio to develop their game, but in return own all of the IP and almost all of the revenue from a game (and sequels!!).

Nowadays with digital distribution one of the main reasons to need a traditional publisher is gone but there are other things they can help with like PR, advertising and marketing budgets around launch, getting you onto marketplaces like Steam, etc. Sometimes this could be more of a partnership than a publishing deal.

I've just started talks with a few indie-friendly publishers for Guild of Dungeoneering so I thought I would share my list for others considering this approach. Some of these are full-on publishers with a focus on indie games, some are actual indie developers who also publish other dev's games, and some are marketing specialists.

I'm focused primarily on PC, as is most of the above list, but if you are looking for help with a mobile game I'd recommend looking through this twitter list as quite a few of the list are mobile-focused.

Thanks to the Indie Game Developers facebook group, @kristruitt, @LukeD and /r/gamedev for helping me put this list together. If you have any suggestions to add to this list feel free to leave a comment!

Getting Your Game Greenlit In 2014

Published on 11th June 2014 by Colm | 6 Comments

Making a game for PC or Mac? You'll probably want access to Steam's 75 million subscribers and their often joked-about spending problem. After all it turns out most people are buying games on Steam that they never even install! Now there's a market you want to tap into!

The infamous Steam summer sale

Time to buy some games you won't play!

Steam's almost-monopoly causes some real problems, with gamers often refusing to buy games from you directly, saying "I'd buy it if it was on Steam". A couple of years ago it was basically impossible as an indie dev to get onto Steam. Even with the launch of Greenlight, their crowdsourced vetting service, it was extremely difficult as recently as last September. Fortunately in January Valve started ramping up the number of games they were Greenlighting and right now they are accepting a batch of 75 games every two weeks. Lets ignore for now what this rash of games is going to do for your game's release (hint: find an audience outside Steam) and instead address the question 'How hard is it to get through Greenlight in 2014?'.

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