Developer Blog

Ask a Developer: Finding a Publisher

2012-03-30T16:10:57Z

"Mr. Johnson" wrote to us recently with this question:

As a Developer, how do you go about getting a publisher for your game (publishing services only)? Do you send out letters to game publishers requesting for publishing services, and wait for a response containing instructions or do you send in a package with a demo of your game and request publishing services?

Is this something one can do on their own, or should they have a lawyer (if so, what kind)? I’ve looked all over the Net for info on how to contact and deal with a publisher, but have found nothing.

If you have dealt with publishers yourself, what can someone doing so for the first time expect?

You're not alone, Mr. Johnson -- a lot of new game developers (and experienced ones) grapple with this question.

There are basically two things you might want a publisher for: One is to provide funding for your development. If possible you should try to avoid this -- typically a publisher that pays for development will want to own the Intellectual Property (IP) rights to your game, and will take the lion's share of any royalties. It makes sense for them, but is not a great deal for the developer unless you really have no other way of funding your game.

The second -- the one that you asked about -- is to help you with distributing and marketing your finished product. Marketing is something that smaller devs have a hard time with, and many publishers can do really well. You have to negotiate the rev share, but typically we've heard of deals where the publisher takes maybe 30% of the net revenue in this kind of deal. Generally you get to keep the IP.

The best way to contact publishers is to have somebody on the inside you can contact directly -- this is why networking at GDC, Games Connection, and other such events is really important. If you don't have a direct contact, you can go in through the front door with everyone else. Most publishers have email addresses on their websites for submissions, along with guidelines for submission.

You don't need a lawyer to contact a publisher, but if a publisher is interested in your game, you'll need to sign a distribution agreement, and you might want to have a lawyer look at that before you sign it to make sure you're not giving away more than you expect.

As far as what to expect, realize that most publishers see dozens of game submissions a week -- maybe even hundreds. So you need to show them something that stands out, and that seems like it would fit well with their existing portfolio. I don't think any publishers these days are signing games based on a paper pitch or a powerpoint deck -- you really need to have a playable demo, and if you're new to the industry you might have to have a completely finished game before any publisher will talk seriously to you.

There's a lot more to say about this subject, but there are resources out there to help you. You can find great info about pitching ideas and negotiating with publishers on game developer websites such as GamaSutra and GameDev.net.

Good luck to you, Mr. Johnson!

GDC: Console to Mobile

2012-03-12T17:03:10Z

At GDC 2012 this year, I had the opportunity to present a session on some of the things we learned during Vector Unit's transition from mobile to console development.

Originally the speech was meant to cover a whole range of topics, from development to marketing, but the GDC organizers asked me to focus specifically on production learnings, and to see if I could fit it all into a 25 minute session. I did, but it was a little tight -- my biggest concern during the presentation (other than the general concern about not totally choking :-) ) was making sure I didn't go over my time limit.

I've been happy to see a little coverage about the presentation in the press. I think this article by Dennis Scimeca in Pocket Gamer in particular sums up the main points pretty well:

GDC 2012: Vector Unit's Matt Small on what console devs need to know about mobile gaming

You can download the full powerpoint of the presentation here: GDC 2012: Stranger in a Strange Land. I don't normally put down much in terms of speaker notes, but this time around there was a translator providing simulcast Japanese translation and I had to detail out a little more of what I planned to say in the notes for her reference. The upside to this is you can pretty much read through most of the content of the speech alongside the slides in the downloaded file.

Here's a link to a copy of the SCRUM spreadsheet I mentioned. No warranties on its formulas or effectiveness, of course -- please feel free to use it or modify it for your own purposes as you see fit.

Example SCRUM

Finally, I wanted to share a couple of links to articles that I referenced or that inspired parts of this session.

First off, the survey by Owen Goss that I got my sales figures from. As Owen himself points out, these numbers are not necessarily reflective of the market as a whole, but from what we've seen at Vector Unit they seem to be at least somewhat on the mark:

Results: iOS Game Revenue

And finally, a great article by Emeric Thoa of the Game Bakers that dovetails with many of the things I talked about and also talks about Owen's article:

Money and the App Store

Thoughts on SOPA

2012-01-18T17:36:01Z

Today's the big blackout protest day for SOPA, the anti-piracy bill currently wending its way through Congress.

There are a lot of reasons to dislike SOPA. But as a software developer, I have mixed feelings about the bill, and I have to admit I'm a little annoyed by all the knee-jerk opposition to it.

Granted, it's a poorly written bill. I don't want to see it passed in its current form. But it does try to address a real problem, and the thing that bugs me is that opposition to the bill never proposes any kind of alternative solution.

As with the whole ratings issue, ultimately the solution should come from the private sector. But the private sector has been achingly silent on the issue.

Here's an example of the kind of thing I'd like to see:

Youtube self-regulates copyright infringement through content search and advertising revenue. It also provides copyright holders a means to flag infringing content for review. Yet if you do a simple Google search for one of my games, you get any number of hits on the first page or two that take you directly to pirate sites where users can (for Android apps) just click a link and download the game for free. I suspect many users who do so don't even know they're pirating the game. And yet Google provides no means for me to flag a link for review. I can, however, flag content as "inappropriate" -- why is that? Boobs bad but pirated software OK?

Maybe it isn't a perfect solution, but it's an example of the kind of thing I'd like to see companies like Google talking about, instead of just putting a stupid black bar over their logo.

So to all o' youse who are applauding the blackout today: Why not take advantage of the browsing downtime and spend a little brain power thinking up real solutions? If you want a vibrant independent game developer community, you need to be concerned not only about free speech, but also about the ability of said independent developers to turn a profit.

Only an App developer...

2011-10-27T19:51:20Z

Some days my life seems.... a little unreal.

How else can you explain the picture to the left? The hottest new iPhone and one of the hottest new Android phones bought by the same person within an hour of each other.

And why? Not because I'm going to use them. Oh no. So we can debug some stuff on them.

Weirdest conversation with the guy at the Apple Store too:

Me: Hi, I'd like to buy an iPhone 4S!

Genius: OK, what carrier do you want? Sprint? Verizon? AT&T?

Me: I don't care. Whichever you have in stock.

Genius: Er, OK. Well what size do you want? 16GB? 32GB?

Me: Whichever is cheapest.

Genius: Ah, OK. And, uh...what color do you want?

Me: I don't care. Whatever you have in stock.

Genius: Really? Most people ... whatever, OK --

Me: No wait, white. [After realizing all our other iPhones are black, so white will help us tell them apart more easily. Who's the Genius now??]

Genius: Ok, white. Well you're in luck, we have just a couple in stock. These things have been selling out really fast.

Me: That's awesome, thanks. What's your return policy again?

The guy must have thought I was a freaking lunatic.

Actually I'm being kind of a jerk about it -- Sorry, I'm sleepy. It's actually a really sweet phone. So's the S2. The nerd in me would be drooling over getting a chance to play with both of these puppies. If I weren't so busy. And if my credit card weren't emitting low moans of ultimate pain and suffereing from inside my wallet.

SHH! Bad credit card!

The long days of summer

2011-09-23T16:52:26Z

Wow. I just realized it's been months since we posted anything up here in the old Vector Unit blog. Sorry for the extended downtime -- we've been craaaazzzy busy.

What have we been busy with?

Well there's Riptide GP for one. We haven't really made any official announcements, but I don't think it's any surprise at this point that Riptide GP is on its way to iPhone, iPad, and non-Tegra Android phones and tablets. We've been hard at work porting the game over and testing it to make sure the game is as fast and fun as possible on a whole range of new devices.

We've also been working on a brand new game which we're really excited about. I won't say too much about it, except that it involves water. And moonshine. And chickens. Stay tuned for an announcement sometime in October.

OK well that's enough time in the blogosphere. Gotta get back to work!

How Free is Freemium?

2011-07-16T18:28:24Z

Playing Gun Bros this weekend I think I finally "get" the dual-income Freemium business model.

I was always puzzled about why you need to design two different kinds of money in a Freemium game (at least, this type of Freemium game.) Why not just one? But now I get it -- Money A is is for the cheapos out there (like me) who just want to earn money by grinding, Money B is for people who give a little back to the developers -- who are willing to click on ads, invite Friends, or pay out real money -- in exchange for extra special buffs or upgrades. (Of course you can buy extra Money A too if you want.)

I have to say, to my surprise I'm even finding Gun Bros fun. It's a silly game, the art is cute, the game is entertaining, and the plentiful upgrades are pretty satisfying. Even the economy -- while it seemed complicated at first -- is not overly annoying. Haven't actually paid any money yet, although I've definitely felt the temptation.

We've been talking a lot at Vector Unit about whether it makes sense for us to try and design a game around this type of economy, rather than our usual "old fashioned" way of just making games that people pay for once and then just...play.

Freemium is tempting. You get craptons of downloads, and from everything we've seen if you design the game right, you can make a lot more money than you can with a regular pay-to-play game. Also it helps combat piracy (why pirate a free game?)

But man, I don't know. I still have some problems with this whole model.

For one thing, it seems odd to call these games "casual" when in fact the currency management is as complicated as any mid-level console RPG. It seriously took me a while to figure out Gun Bros, and it's not even complicated compared to Farmville or something.

But also, I think there's something kind of messed up about a game that allows -- even encourages -- players to spend this much money. In Gun Bros, the cheapest coin package you can buy is $2.99 -- which is probably about how much the game would cost if it were a P2P game. The biggest package of in-game booster currency you can buy costs $199. TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS. For a simple dual stick shooter!

I wonder if there will ever be some kind of backlash against games like this and Farmville. From a social-good standpoint, it seems like there's a very fine line between online gambling addiction and Freemium gaming compulsion.

And what about the gamers who support these "free" games, who complain about mobile games that you have to pay for? Do they realize what they're giving up? That the game mechanics are designed around increasing your frustration and impatience, rather than your entertainment and enjoyment?

I'm not saying we're not going to try this out at some point. Man, the numbers don't lie. But I still feel like there's something to be said for paying $2, or $5, or -- gasp -- even $20 or more for a clean, well designed game experience that doesn't ask anything from me other than my pleasure.

The tech behind Riptide GP

2011-06-27T23:40:27Z

You would think that converting a current-gen console game engine to a phone would be a daunting task. I’m happy to report that this is not the case! This year’s crop of smartphones with their multiple CPU cores and competent GPUs are definitely up to the task.

When we started developing Riptide GP for Tegra 2, we had certain expectations of the performance we could squeeze out of these devices. The GPU (graphics) more or less met our expectations, so we were able to hit our graphics quality and rendering performance targets by optimizing the fragment shaders and doing more work per vertex. However, we were completely blown away by the CPU (computation). The dual-core ARM Coretex A9 is an amazing piece of silicon. What’s running in Riptide GP is the same underlying water simulation that powered our previous game on the Xbox 360!

Besides our internal tech there are three key components that made Riptide GP possible: The Android NDK, Bullet Physics, and FMOD Sound System. The NDK allows us to write native C++ code which is then optimized for the ARM architecture. Bullet Physics, which we use for collision detection and rigid body simulation, just worked out of the box. FMOD Sound System released an Android version of their SDK just in time, which has been working flawlessly since the first release.

An embarrassment of riches

2011-06-01T00:21:53Z

One of the great things about being a game developer, is people send you free hardware -- game consoles, dev kits, phones, tablets -- to work with, so you get to try out all the latest cool devices.

The most recent addition to our small but growing collection of Tegra2 stuff is 4 brand new, shiny LG G2X phones, courtesy of the good people at T-Mobile. We're not actually holding on to these: We're pre-installing copies of Riptide GP, and loaning them out to game review sites that don't have Tegra2 devices to play the game on.

Even though these are just passing through, I couldn't resist taking a picture of these four awesome phones, all charged up and running Riptide GP in parallel. As I said, we've had the opportunity to try a lot of Tegra2 hardware, and although they each have their relative strengths, the G2X is one of our favorites. It's a good size, it's nice and light, and like all Tegra2 phones it's awesome for games.

If only I could keep one for myself ... :-)

Phew

2011-05-27T23:40:38Z

Ahh, Memorial Day weekend is here, the sun is FINALLY shining, and Riptide GP is out there in the Android Market doing it's thing.

We started work on RGP right at the start of January, and finished it in about four and a half months. That's pretty quick for a game of this type -- by comparison, Hydro Thunder Hurricane took us about a year to finish, not counting the initial prototype.

Riptide was definitely a push. We put in some long hours and weekends. But it seemed to go pretty fast. We were totally excited about the idea the whole time we were working on it, and the long hours went by in a blur, because we were working hard to make the game better, trying to squeeze in as much polish as we could in the time we had. It's a lot easier to work hard when you're pumped on what you're doing, instead of working hard just to barely scrape by.

When we started, the goal was to basically just create a super simple water racing game that would show off the graphical power of the Tegra 2 hardware. But as we got more into it, we decided to add additional features: the Championship mode, the reverse tracks, all the OpenFeint stuff.

The whole stunt/boost mechanic got added on a whim in a couple of days right around GDC. The game was pretty fun at that point but it needed something more, and we figured as long as we have the characters on those jet skis, we might as well do something interesting with them. As soon as we got them in there, with the swipe gestures, we knew it had to be a part of the game.

So now it's done and people seem to be enjoying it, and that feels really, really good. Now we have a chance to take a breath and figure out what comes next. I took a short vacation last week to NYC, and Ralf is going to sunny Mexico next week for some well deserved margarita therapy.

As for what comes next...... well, we have some ideas. In fact one idea in particular that we're pretty excited about. But that's for another post.

The 5 most literate video games

2011-05-06T14:52:59Z

Yesterday I spoke to a group of English undergrads at UC Berkeley about my career in video games, about the (sometimes unexpected) ways in which my English degree has helped me in the industry.

One of the great questions that came up during the Q&A afterwards was, "If you were going to teach an English class on video games, what 5 games would be in your syllabus?"

The thing I like about this question is that, although I've spent lots of time thinking about my favorite games from a gameplay standpoint, I haven't really thought that deeply about which were my favorite from a literary standpoint. Which ones told the best stories or had the best writing? Which stretched our ideas of how interactive storytelling might differ from written storytelling?

Unfortunately because I hadn't previously thought about games this way I kind of whiffed on the answer and only came up with two: Valve's Portal and Infocom's Planetfall. Well I've thought about it some more now, and here's what I would have answered:

Planetfall (Infocom)

As text adventures go this wasn't necessarily the best-written or the cleverest. But I love it still for the way it blended comedy with a sense of isolation, and particularly the manner in which it drove both of those home in the character of Floyd, the service robot who befriends and ultimately gives his "life" so your character can survive.

Halflife (Valve)

All of the Halflife games are great, but I'd probably pick the first one for the fact that it broke new ground in immersive storytelling. Who knew you could tell a compelling story in the midst of a fluid and exciting action-game experience without taking a player out of that experience with lame non-interactive cut-scenes and cinematics?

Portal (Valve)

Maybe it's not cool to have two games by the same company in the top five, but Portal really took the immersive storytelling pioneered in Halflife to the next level. As you first begin to play through the inventive puzzles in Portal you almost don't even realize there's a narrative at all, but Valve reveals a rich backstory and, in GLaDOS, one of the most complex, funny and terrifying characters ever imagined in any medium.

Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico)

I actually liked Ico better than SotC, but I think SotC tells a more compelling story. As you seek out and methodically destroy the enigmatic Colossi, your relationship to them evolves in surprising ways. At first it feels heroic and exciting. But as one Colossus after another collapses and falls under your sword, you begin to wonder -- why am I doing this? What did these things ever do to me? Who's really the victim? Best of all, the game never provides a tidy explanation at the end, leaving it to you to work out the answers to these questions for yourself.

Grim Fandango (Lucas Arts)

I'd have to include one game written by Tim Schafer, because I think he's pretty much the single best writer working in the game industry. On one level Grim Fandango is no more literate than a 50's pulp detective novel. But the way it stretches those pulp conventions with tight storytelling, clever dialog, memorable characters, and of course the surprising and delightful mashup of genre fiction and Mexican Day of the Dead iconography makes this game hold up even after all these years.

Hm.......

Honestly I'm still not completely satisfied with this list. There are dozens of games I thought about including and didn't -- Bioshock, the Fallout series, Limbo, Indigo Prophecy... I really wanted to include one of the GTA series, because the quality of Rockstar's storytelling and dialog often surprises people who just think of them as violent panderers. And there are probably a dozen more games that should be in here that are slipping my mind.

Ah well. Consider it a work in progress.