Welcome to the first in a new series of ‘secret developer’ blogs, in which mobilegamer.biz readers can let off steam about the mobile games business anonymously.
First up: a piece looking at the sorry state of mobile game publishing, written by an experienced developer currently seeking a publisher.
I am writing as a developer who has been lucky enough to work for multiple game studios that self-publish their products. Over the years, my own exposure to publishers has been limited to DMs on LinkedIn asking to meet at this conference or that event or to share our numbers with them.
The upshot of self-publishing is building up the discipline of growth within an organisation, so that even the most anti-marketing engineers are exposed to the demands of performance marketing on the development of live games.
Recently, owing to the drying up of capital across the industry, I have had the displeasure of discussing our fledgling IP with publishers and I am shocked (SHOCKED!) at the dearth of knowledge and understanding of games in the publishing sector of the industry.
It’s more common than not to end up discussing the fineries of game development with a person who simply read the SOP manual in their onboarding week and has no further understanding of how performance evolves over the lifecycle of a game.
The following is a non-exhaustive account of some of the conversations I’ve had:
The obsession with vanity metrics
“Hi what is retention D1?” read the email. No signoff or pleasantries, no hoping the email finds me well. As the conversation evolved, I learned that this particular publisher cannot see a correlation between UA and D1 retention in tests where the budget is less than $1,000.
There is no interest in the long term evolution of the game’s mechanics and monetization, just a box-ticking exercise to green light a conversation with the next in line, who also has no direct experience in game development.
These conversations belong, of course, to hyper-opportunistic, hyper-exploitative hyper-casual publishers. Some people are just happy to be working in the game industry at all, and I wish them well.
The race to the bottom
“We are looking for project funding” says I. “Let’s not waste each other’s time if that’s not something you are able to provide.” After all, if there’s no match from the beginning, what’s the point in talking in the first place? “We do fund projects!”, he replies, which was a good sign, and a call with a publishing manager was arranged for the following week.
As that call progresses, it becomes clear and obvious that this particular publisher is fishing, that their ‘project funding’ is $5,000 per prototype, and offers the potential for a 90/10 revenue share in favour of the publisher after their costs are recovered, naturally.
So after bootstrapping a project for close to six months, our best hope is to sell that prototype for peanuts.
The “we can only support live games” conundrum
Once you venture away from the bottom of the barrel, where highly experienced operators are supposed to exist, you find the larger entities that one might normally associate with a traditional mobile game publishing model.
However, most are simply business developers with a larger budget and a similar lack of experience. The only hope of finding support here is by having an already-live game where the publisher’s only value-add is to support with UA funding, which any developer worth their salt could achieve elsewhere, while retaining ownership of their IP, and not face the feature-veto of inexperienced business development folks.
In my view, there is currently a substantial opportunity for a forward-thinking and proactive publishing outfit that is run and operated by experienced game developers, and not by business development or finance types. That operation would exist to be the genesis of new game production, and not the inexperienced, passive, and exploitative model we have to deal with in the present situation.
Are you the next secret developer? Email neil@mobilegamer.biz with 500 words on any topic you feel deserves more discussion, and we’ll consider it for publication. Everything is 100% anonymous, so you can speak as freely as you please.
