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[Spidi]

Hi there,

I would like to ask if any of you have ever worked together with a small publisher or marketing firm for handling the distribution of your indie title?

I'm thinking about putting my next title in the hands of a small publisher, because I seriously lack the necessary skills in that department, but I don't have much knowledge nor experience in this topic.

Was the collaboration fruitful, did they deliver on their promise, did working with them removed the difficulty/stress of marketing?
If you could share your thoughts and experience I think that would help a lot!

Br.

[Schrompf]

My only experience so far: they did nothing but send out a Press Release, then put the game in bundles and sales way too early, so it's pretty much wortless by now. Before going under they sent out 60k of Steam keys to various online shops and bundles, of which I never earned a single cent.

A few years ago such a small publisher would have been your saviour - he would get you to Steam, and because most devs weren't able to get there this was the one golden chance and a near-guaranteed amount of money. Nowadays there's Greenlight; and Valve is greenlighting everything under the sun and then some. Being on Steam nowadays is a prerequisite but no guarantee anymore. Effect of journalist's reviews is nearly non-existant anymore, being covered even by large sites results in exactly zero sales. But the small publishers still haven't caught on as far as I can tell. They're still sending out Press Releases, they still preach to their old friends at various websites and magazines. Which in my book makes them useless.

Stay away.

[DanglinBob]

That's a harsh view!

I also believe that publishers don't bring a lot to the table these days, but the PR work is not useless and not worthless. It probably isn't worth 50% of your revenue either, but its value isn't zero.

Website reviews are certainly a small piece of the pie these days. For PC RPS still represents a sizable earnings chunk. Last time I had a Wut I think article it generated about 10k in sales.

Youtube however now represents a MUCH larger chunk of the PR world. Good video reviews/lets plays = money.

As for the other items, they're all accretive. It takes basically no work to give a review code to a website and generates a trickle of traffic. Eventually though all that trickle ends up being worth something- and the more people who cover your game the more who will want to cover it. You can sorta build up to success in this way.

I dont know about using small publishers. They'd need to really bring something of value to the table beyond PR.

For instance if they guaranteed you a spot in a Humble Bundle 6 months from your launch date - that's something of tangible value that you may not be able to do on your own. Maybe you could, but the point of a publisher is to decrease the developer's risk and something guaranteed like that would be substantial.

That said, I doubt a small publisher will be able to make such a promise - and if they DO make the promise you need to make sure that you can do something should they fail (IE: an advance against those royalties).

[David 'jefequeso' Szymanski]

Hi there,

I would like to ask if any of you have ever worked together with a small publisher or marketing firm for handling the distribution of your indie title?

I'm thinking about putting my next title in the hands of a small publisher, because I seriously lack the necessary skills in that department, but I don't have much knowledge nor experience in this topic.

Was the collaboration fruitful, did they deliver on their promise, did working with them removed the difficulty/stress of marketing?
If you could share your thoughts and experience I think that would help a lot!

Br.

I've never worked directly with a publisher, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.  That being said...

I wouldn't suggest using a publisher unless you know for a fact that they can offer something you can't do in terms of marketing or release.  For instance, if you're having a hard time getting through Greenlight.  Or if they can guarantee an LP from a big Youtuber or a review on a big site like RPS.  Not sure how they would guarantee that.  Sounds questionably ethical to me.  But, point being, if they can do something you can't.

Getting press from small sites and LPs on small channels is easy.  Certainly not worth paying a percentage of your income for.  What's more, if it's just marketing you're after, some publishers offer marketing packages that you just pay a fee for, rather than having to split your income.

I've self-published both my Steam games, but I've been considering paying for some marketing recently.  Getting the attention of bigger channels and bigger sites is rather difficult, unless you get lucky.  And even then, there doesn't seem to be much of a "business relationship" with certain channels.  One of my free games was moderately popular with Let's Players for awhile.  Yet I've been unable to even get a reply from many of those channels since.  Nope, apparently the genuinely awful slapdash RPG Maker game Five Nights at Fuckboys deserves that spotlight more. 

tl;dr
I'd be very wary of using a publisher unless you know they can do something that you can't do yourself, and you know that thing will be worth the cut they take.  Otherwise, just publish it yourself, and pay for marketing out of pocket if needbe.