Do Game Developers Still Need Publishers in 2020?

hey hey this video is brought to you by squarespace thanks squarespace yay hey wow hi i see you there thank you for watching this video my name is thomas fresh i'm the creator of a game called neversong and also a game called pinstripe both of those games you can check out in the links in the description and if you want to learn how i made those games for pretty much every platform on the planet and how i make games full time you can check out fulltimegamedev.com it's an online course that i'm creating it's really cool guys click the links in the description okay so today i want to talk about something that's really exciting really dear to my heart and that is our publishers actually necessary as an indie game developer do we need publishers anymore in the year of 2020 and beyond well i had a really good conversation with a good friend of mine named david whaley and david's kind of on the fence about publishers whereas i'm kind of all good with publishers i tend to work with publishers and i enjoy it and it's fun and it makes things a lot easier as an indie game developer so let's take a look at this clip and really get a refresher and honestly guys david's smarter than me so you should really listen to david oh and by the way have you clicked that like button or maybe just given a little tickle just tickle that like button thank you that would really mean a lot to me let's go okay guys before we get started this video is brought to you by squarespace believe it or not i've been wanting squarespace as a sponsor for so long mainly because squarespace is awesome i've been using squarespace for i think six years um both my websites thomasbrush.com and atmosgames.com where i host my games and my portfolio my resume all that cool stuff is hosted on squarespace it was created with squarespace squarespace is cool because you can look amazing you can have custom designs and pretty much do anything you need to do for your business or your own personal brand all with squarespace and you don't have to know how to code so if you guys are interested in creating a website um with squarespace click the link below squarespace.com thomasbrush and use the promo code thomasbrush for 10 off yay yay i love squarespace i really do thanks squarespace you know and here's this reminds me of something that i love you know celebrating our similarities me and thomas brush i think that's cool we have so much ins yeah we have so much you know that's similar but i think the biggest difference between us is you're very experienced and you're very like publisher driven and i've and i tell people exactly the opposite i said i say people you do not need a publisher right i'd love to hear your thoughts on like you you're like a big you're a big cheerleader for publishers and for the smaller i am publishers and i'm i feel like i'm the opposite where i'm like publishers they're a middleman you can you can self-publish on consoles by yourself you don't need them well it depends right so uh and then i'd love i would love to hear your opinion the other side of it um so for me publishers provide two things and these are not traditional things traditionally a publisher provides you with marketing distribution blah blah blah that's not really what a publisher in my opinion should be offering you as a game developer because you don't really need not really you don't really need someone to help you with distribution in quotes like that's that's basically a glittering generality that means nothing now because steam is handling your distribution switch is handling your distribution if you were selling books you would need help but you're not selling books you're selling digital copies little little keys of your game right so what a publisher for me what a publisher where a publisher provides value is they give you money so that you can quit your job so you don't have to be miserable that's the first part so 50 000 to like 200 grand bang in your account and you can get started they're going to take 30 of your revenue or 50 or whatever but at least you can quit your job and make your game twice as fast full-time right yeah full-time with a so basically you're working for a publisher now right yeah and then what they're going to do is they're going to recoup that so not only are they going to take 40 they're also going to recoup it up so when i launched pinstripe i had to recoup a certain amount of money that i can't disclose and captioning not the first available why i love publishers is just money so basically they're just investors really they're not really publishing they're just investing so the big number one thing is like the freedom to focus full-time on your game yep yep and you get rid of that misery uh and so like now the question is well thomas why do you want to work with publishers again when you said you were in a really good position financially well i'm only going to work with a publisher if they can provide developers so in this in a sense i'm not really partnering with publishers anymore i'm partnering with developers uh that work at a publisher so that's why i love serenityforge serenityforge handles publishing and they handle development if you're willing to negotiate a reasonable revenue share i've come to discover that sometimes almost half of the revenue is reasonable because they double they they cut your development time down you don't have to worry about all of these different variables about making a game because they're handling a huge boulder of um of development that you otherwise couldn't do you know so that's that's my only two reasons that makes sense i yeah like for yeah it's just interesting there's so many ways to go around it because i i i like i don't know i like staying independent i i did i tell you i had some big i had big publishers approach me for the first tree one was so big i don't even know if i can say it but they do aaa games and i was so freaked out by it because i was like oh this could be life-changing but then i started thinking about it and how i liked the hobbyist aspect of it and how like i didn't have to answer to anybody i think what's cool about your deal with serenity forge is you're you're the creative director like you you have full creative control is that right i've never yeah so i i've uh okay i've signed three publisher agreements in the past um one of them i got completely screwed over and i learned my lesson right and my and i had an attorney for all three and so um the first attorney was like for the first publishing agreement was like thomas be careful of all of these things and i ignored him and just signed anyway um that was a terrible agreement this the other two that i signed the other two that i signed my attorney was like you've gotta tell them that you're in complete control of everything and i said okay and so i i told the i told the publisher i told armor games and serenity forge and they're this is fine they wouldn't mind me telling you i i told them that i was in complete control and they were like we trust you i don't know why that's awesome that's like a dream yeah no it's amazing and so it's not it wasn't even it wasn't just control of the art or the game it was control over the schedule everything so like i didn't even have a schedule in the contract a lot of publishers will be like and you know this is fair if i was a publisher i would demand this i would say look if i'm gonna give you a hundred grand you need to get the game done in a year like i can't i can't just sit here and wait for four years to get my money back so i get that from a publisher perspective but the publishers i've worked with um serenity forge and armor games i connected really well with the ceos like we we're like friends like i text armor games ceo all the time i t uh serenity forge's ceo his name is uh he's so nice he's so great and he's he's probably uh we're all kind of the same age i think um so we we sort of are in a similar uh like a age group and and uh we just at least me and zee i mean we connect really well drive we just jive and so there wasn't a need for him to go well i want you to have the game done in you know a year and i i want this is what the budget is and and i want i want to have you know a say in the creative direction he didn't say any of that he just said make a great game thomas and and here's a developer to help you out and to me you know that that is a really great deal and i i when i signed the deal with serenity forge i was like wait is this a bad idea because i gave up a good chunk of revenue and over the years i learned this was the best thing that could have happened because we made a really good game with the help of eric who was the developer uh the coder eric programmed an amazing game and i was able to focus all my attention on what i do well right and and we now we saw you know we we partnered with apple we got a front page on steam for five days we're about to launch on switch and that's amazing and a few other platforms so it's just indeed success that's an indie success by far yeah and so i want to know your perspective on things though like do you feel like if so if a publisher would have said i want you to have full creative control would you have considered signing with them oh man that's that's interesting question i'm just i'm thinking about how it worked out for you and how it's been great here's something i do want to say this is to everybody listening if you're if it's your very first game and you're just getting out of you know you're just finally entering this whole new world of game development and you get a bunch of publishers that you've never heard of saying hey let me help you with marketing and publishing yeah i would say i agree 99.9 that is a not a deal you want to make yeah and i would say you have an awesome partnership with serenity forge and it does it sounds awesome i might be tainted by when i was working on homes where one starts countless publishers saying oh you need us like you're not going to succeed without us and they just all they do is siphon it's all they do is they they've slapped their name on it on the steam page and they siphon 40 of your funds for no reason but what you did is you made games first and you made a name for yourself you had unity fly out make a film about you and then and you finished games that's the way to get a publisher i would agree with that yeah what i would say is when you're first starting off making your very first small games i don't think there's any reason to get a publisher at the beginning yeah that's a really really good point and a really good perspective you know i always say uh me and my wife talk about this what i talk about work a lot and she's she probably gets annoyed like my wife uh-huh yeah okay um but uh when we talk i always say i'm just so lucky to have a really dedicated youtube audience because if i ever get screwed over by a publisher they're not gonna be happy my my my backers people who got my back and so i always say if you're if you're gonna you know if you're gonna partner up with a company that you don't know be sure you've got some ammunition yeah because they do i promise you they do they've got money they've got a team of people lawyers they've got lawyers they've got everybody and this is not true for serenity forge or armor games at all but i can speak to having experience with another publisher where behind closed doors like i'm in south carolina they're off in california somewhere or where were they they were somewhere in the in the midwest and i knew i knew that they were talking about what they were going to do to screw me over and they didn't see it that way they just saw it as business as usual but what they were doing to screw over an 18 year old well i didn't know any of that and so i wasn't talking to them and so they had all this ammunition against me this power and so it's really important for any developers to have power behind them and it doesn't necessarily have to be cash it definitely can be a lawyer that you paid four thousand dollars to to help you out but it can also be in the form of a social media following which is so huge and you're doing that right now and you're killing it you're doing a really good job and i just i want i want all of my uh all of the people watching this or listening to this podcast to know that you can't put a price tag on an army that supports [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Thomas Brush

Views: 33,491

Keywords: Thomas Brush, game development, making games full-time, game publishers, indie game developer, get paid to make games, making money with games, funding your game, marketing video games, releasing a game on steam, publishing games on switch, publishing games on console, partnering with a game publisher, making a living with game development, entrepreneurship, promoting your game, releasing a successful game, get rich making games, self publishing games, indie games, business

Id: nxiscoDXL1A

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020