2016 Selected Workgroup Topics2016 Workgroup Topic Proposals

Creating Games in a Post-Publisher World

In the (not so) Good Old Days, a publisher gave you (barely enough) money to create a game, which you created, and then you shared the profits (in the same way that the lion shares the kill with the hyena).

At this week’s Game Designers Workshop, Gordon Walton brought up an interesting topic. In today’s mobile game world and beyond, this role of the publisher (as funder and, in rare cases, as helpful mentor) is going away. Where will the funding come from to make games? And more generally, how can “the little guys” make games in this post-publisher world? VCs have no interest in funding individual game projects. Kickstarter (or, as Warren Spector calls it, “Kickfinisher”) showed promise for a while, but appears to be waning in effectiveness.

Are we facing a future dystopia in which the 1% feasts and the 99% starves? What are the current avenues for getting games funded, and what are avenues that don’t exist, but should be willed into existence? We discussed some of this during Gordon’s session at the GDW, but I think it deserves a longer discussion.

One thought on “Creating Games in a Post-Publisher World

  1. This is right up our alley as we’ve just transitioned in the last year from being a third party developer, reliant on publisher funds, to a self funding entity. Just shipped our first self published title, and now staring down the barrel of figuring out how to internally green-light / kill more ambitious game concepts.

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