Videogame publishers are large international organisations whose main function in this relationship is to sponsor the development of games and to provide development studios with the knowledge of the international market, distribution channels, and a pool of skills and resources, including art, design, programming, acting, etc. For instance, SEGA is a typical multinational videogame publisher, hiring almost 5,000 staff in their headquarters in Japan and their multiple offices around the world. SEGA owns internal studios developing videogames, but they also invest immensely in independent developers to draw upon their skills and expertise. Although a developer can use a different business model, independent from a publisher, this traditional business model is still prevalent within the industry. This is mainly because this publisher-developer relationship provides the partners access to multiple resources and as a result helps them maintain competitive advantage in a volatile and risky business environment. In this thesis, I have focused on this business relationship that is formed to create a big-budget videogame that requires a wide range of skills and expertise drawn from both companies (developers and publishers), as well as investments sometimes reaching to multi-million pounds for a two to three year project.
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Although the developer's main contribution to the project is creating new ideas and developing these ideas into games, the publisher is also involved in the development process to different degrees, shaping the concept and supporting the process throughout the whole project. In a development studio, there are usually different disciplines that are distinct, yet interdependent and interactive. These different disciplines are programmers, artists, designers, the quality assurance team (QA) and sometimes the research and development team (R&D), each of which is headed by a team leader or team director.
Depending on the size of the development studio, a producer or a production team composed of producers and project managers supervise the development team and the project/game development internally. In the case of large budget games, and in the three networks I have examined, all projects have one or two producers – this was highlighted in section 5.3. Developer producers are responsible for the interactions with their counterpart in the publishing organisation, called the publisher producer. Since the publisher is essentially responsible for the manufacturing and distribution of the game, the different departments that shape the organisation are sales, marketing, finance, legal, QA, executive management, etc. It should be noted that all the game production and the interactions between the two partners are supervised and managed by the publisher producer, who involves teams of artists, designers, programmers, etc. to assess and support the developer and development process.
In the publisher-developer relationship, throughout an entire production cycle almost all departments within a development studio have to work (sometimes very closely) with different publisher departments, in order for this partnership to be successful. However, this is a problematic process, due to a number of areas of contention. Examples of the typical decisions that can be contentious between these two parties are outlined below.
These points will be further referred to frequently in this chapter:
• Design Decisions – This is one of the major tensions between the developer and publisher. Earlier in development, design decisions might be compromised and/or facilitated easily between the developer and the publisher. However, later on in the project, the need for stabilising the software, as well as the extra resources required to incur changes, make it difficult to accommodate changes, which becomes a contentious subject between the two.
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• Release Date – All parties have a huge interest in making sure that the project is released on time and on budget. For the development studio a missed release date could incur additional development costs at their own expense or a reduction in royalties, depending on the terms of the contract. For the publisher, a missed release date could mean wasted marketing budget, lost ground to competitor products, lost revenue and a major impact on the financial year’s results.
• Budget – Whilst an initial budget is agreed upon when the long-form contract is drawn up between the two parties, changes in market conditions, technology and further design requirements can necessitate additional funding to be called for, often leading to extreme differences.
• Ad-Hoc Requests – Due to the complex make-up of a publishing organisation, demands from the publisher on the development team can often come at relatively short notice and cannot always be easily accommodated by the development schedule. These ad-hoc requests can be mainly design-related, such as adding a feature to the game, or changing a feature, etc. When these demands are repeated and extended over a period of time, it can put significant strain on the relationship.
• Milestone Deliverables – These are pre-arranged deadlines, usually at four to eight week intervals, for which the developer has to deliver an interim/updated version of the game, in exchange for a pre-agreed payment to fund the next phase of development. Different publisher departments will assess the
"deliverables" and upon their approval the payment for that stage will be processed. The production teams of both companies draw up the milestone criteria at the early stages of development. Whilst there is usually some flexibility, the agreed milestone schedule needs to be maintained in order to keep the publisher’s confidence in the schedule and overall project quality.
As discussed earlier, the publisher and the developer form partnerships to share the high risk of game production and to mutually benefit from the collaboration. However, throughout the history of the videogames industry, the relationship between the developer and the publisher has been portrayed as challenging and problematic (Heaton, 2012). Some people in the industry believe the relationship is irreconcilable or as a developer explains
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“the marriage is set out to fail” (Todd – developer executive); therefore, the dominant rhetoric suggests empowering the small developers to self-publish their own products, where there will be no need for them to collaborate with the publisher (Fahey, 2015).
However, according to Mendez (2017), the traditional publisher-developer relationship is still deemed crucial to produce high-end products, due to the large sums invested, as well as the knowledge and expertise these types of products require. Therefore, regardless of conflicts and challenges, he suggests rethinking the relationship, creating a sustainable and workable collaboration.