GarageGames has posted an indie publishing agreement (http://www.garagegames.com/pg/publishing.php) on their re-designed site they claim to offer royalties starting at 65%.

They haven't actually started selling any games on their site but an interview on Avault suggests that they will be this month. It will be interested to see how this works out for them.

This could be another viable option for those of you out there looking for a publisher. I'd be curious to here what you guys think about garage games as a publisher?

Anyone know how the % is calculated? Is that a % of the retail sales price, the wholesale price, the retail price minus certain deductions, etc?

It says on their site that developers still must provide end-user support for their own games. So it seems like GG is aiming for a middle ground between being a publisher and being a registration service. There's no mention about providing QA for published games, so I'm not sure if they provide this.

I personally think it's great to see another indie publisher, as it provides more legitimacy for the whole indie movement. Dexterity is only able to publish about 1% of games submitted to us, so there are plenty of developers we can't directly serve that other indie publishers might be able to.

The real key here is 65% of what. How many games will they sell? If it's a lot, then great. If it's not, then 65% doesn't really mean much. Only time will tell I suppose :)

From what I gathered from the IGC, and I preface this by saying that this is hear-say and is in no wise representative of GG actual policies....

GaragGames indeed does not supply any Support for the title, however it does supply customer support tools on it's site for managing customer feeback, tracking bugs etc.

I also understood it to be 65% of the net revenues... but I really dont know for sure.

I do not believe they provide any QA either, i'm not sure how they controll quality of released titles. However I have played each of the 3 games that they plan to launch their "Play Games" site with, and they are all were very stable when I played them a month ago.

The royalty rate is real. We subtract VISA charges before calculating the royalties.

We do require developers to provide their own support. It is our belief that publishers cannot provide proper support. Rather than paying us to provide your support, we pass the money on to you. The cleaner your game, the less time you have to spend on support.

If you want turn-key, hands-off from the customer and feel that having support provided is a must, then GG is not for you. We think there are many ways games can be published, and our approach it just one way.

Our desire it not to be a huge publishing company, but more of an instrument for independent developers to sell their products. We are much more than a listing service. You might note the amount of PR and news we will be generating over the next few weeks. In addition to all the PR, we have any awesome marketing guy, Jay Moore, that has begun many initiatives that will generate much attention over the next year.

GarageGames will become a household name. We've made games played by millions of people, and we now we have a vision for doing this differently.

We started our company by providing a great game development engine, the Torque, for the unheard of price of $100 per programmer. In the sixteen months since we launched that product we have been working on making it better and helping teams make games. Two days ago, the fruits of that labor paid off and we launched our first games, Marble Blast, Chain Reaction, and Robot Battle. We have many more awesome titles in the pipeline, and we'll be known for how good our games are. Feel free to check out the new ecommerce addition to the site.

I'm not trying to steal any thunder from Dexterity here, I just want to make our position clear. As I stated at IndieGamesCon, our first annual conference for independent game developers, I think Dexterity is one of the great places to have your indie game published.

Regards,

Hey Jeff, welcome to the boards it's nice to see you post over here. Thanks for elaborating on some of the details of your new publishing agreement.

I don't think people around here (it's a pretty mature crowd) are petty enough to think that there isn't enough room for two indie publishers, or that they need to pick one or the other.

I know personally I want to see the "indie" market grow large enough to put pressure on the retail industry and affect change. I firmly believe that we indies have a much better business model. It's only a matter of time before we build enough momentum to pressure the retail industry into making some much needed changes.

The more successful indie publishers we have, the more indie games getting into the hands of satisfied customers the more we all stand to benefit.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
The more successful indie publishers we have, the more indie games getting into the hands of satisfied customers the more we all stand to benefit.

A tad off topic, but has anyone else picked up any of the new titles from GarageGames?

I grabbed Chain Reaction and Marble Blast. Whooo. Great stuff so far. But just as I feared I completely suck at Chain Reaction. Man, all the games i've been playing make me feel like an idiot(Chain Reaction, Cramgene, Crumby, and Buboids). Ohh well.

Anyway, so far the games are well worth the $15 they cost.

I'm still deciding between marble blast and chain reaction, I'm going to ask my wife which one she wants.. I may very well get them both.

It's interesting that they aren’t using the shareware model of distributing a free demo to sell a full version. I'm really curious to know how GG's marketing methods will work out for them. Shareware is a great method to sell games but I think there are other methods of selling games online as well, I’m glad we have publishers trying different things. I'm very curious to see how things will play out.

Personally I'm very excited to see GarageGames and Dexterity doing this -- and I hope they're joined by other high-profile, above-board, non-fly-by-night indie publishers.

I know I've said this before, but having spent three years working on game development inside EA, I can tell you that the traditional retail market is broken. There is a huge opportunity for indie game developers, but only if you don't drink the BigGameCo kool-aid.

So here's to us, and to our expanding market.

*clinks wine glass with alchemist* ;)

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
I'm still deciding between marble blast and chain reaction, I'm going to ask my wife which one she wants.. I may very well get them both.

I'm curious how much replay value either one of these titles will have. I'm on the 20th course in the intermediate level of marble blast, more than halfway through, but they're getting harder and harder so I think i have a ways to go.

As far as the shareware thing goes, I was pretty bummed out to see that there wasnt a demo for either game. Not sure how they can expect people to buy them if they cant play them for a few levels, or at least watch a gameplay movie. Ahh well, well worth the money so far.

Nice to see you here, Jeff.

I can understand your decision on having developers provide support. Having Dexterity provide support was not an easy decision, but in retrospect, I'm confident it turned out to be the right decision for us. Centralizing support for all games allows us to handle support requests efficiently, since most requests are common to multiple games, such as ordering questions, DirectX issues, installation questions, etc. Of the thousands of support requests we handle each year, very few are unique. My concern is that the player support experience would be too inconsistent if it were handled by each individual developer. If a player orders 5 games at once (not an uncommon event for us), they'd have to get support from 5 different developers. So the best customers arguably end up with the worst service.

I was listening on the radio this morning about some recent events in the record industry. Apparently a number of fairly well known artists have been putting on free concerts to protest accounting practices in the record industry. Apparently they have all these things called "Standard Deductions" included in contracts with musicians that make them responsible for broken media, free give aways, researching new technology and other bizarre deductions.

The record industry also does not disclose any of it's accounting audits so there's no independent way to verify exactly how many units were sold and if the artists are actually getting paid.

The music industry has seen CD sales slide 7% in the last year; they largely implicate napsters offspring as the culprits. One of the major music publishers announced recently that they would be absorbing the standard deduction clauses up front and giving artists a larger royalty of a smaller total, the artists end up getting the same amount but it's a lot easier to track. They also announced that they would be releasing their accounting audits in an effort to have a better relationship with musicians in the hope that they will come out against "illegal online distribution"

There are a lot of parallels between the retail games industry and the music industry. Right now Win-Loose contracts are the norm with developers loosing and publishers winning. Ironically the system is so broken that publishers are just barely coming out ahead. I think in the near future indie games could be part of the impetus that causes the retail games industry to re-organize and re-invent itself. It will only do that when it is faced with it's own death, but with it balanced so precariously it wont take much to topple it. Indie games combined with some of the new online distribution platforms present a serious threat to the industry that they just don’t seem to see yet.

There's nothing wrong with selling games in retail, it's a perfectly good medium for selling, if it's done correctly. Right now it's not, but I’m a firm believer that it can given the right pressure to change.

To tie this all back to the thread.... the more quality indie publishers we have offering win-win contracts for developers the better chance we have to increase awareness of indie games and online distribution of games. The more successful titles we have the more customers may start searching the web before they go buy from Wal-Mart. Developers benefit from having different equitable options available to them, and consumers benefit from having attractive choices. In short it's win-win, just the way I like it.

I am just picking your post apart Dan, but I strongly hope you are wrong on your accounts of the retail games industry changing. To be honest with you, I *REALLY* don't wish they changed, just let them die out slowly while small companies eat the market and grow big instead..

Another more valid point is perhaps that publishers are not really the big bad boys here. They are actually in a quite fragile position between the retail chains, their stockholders and the developers. Very few of them can withstand pressure from a strong retail chain, I think most retailers are a few magnitudes bigger.

And I don't really think they are that stupid or slow. If I had to run a company that has public stock, I am quite sure I would do about the same. If you had a budget in the eight or nine range and had to show something next quarter I would not be betting on any of us guys.

But if you had to show profit during the next ten years and don't have a heart attack doing it, I would definetly bet on us. I readily agree with you that small companies are going to grow much more agressively for a long time to come.

Here's my take on it. There is a big market out there for retail games. Because that market exists there will always be people selling retail. You’re never going to get rid of the retail industry, but you might be able to affect change to clean it up a bit. Many industry leaders when faced with their own extinction re-invented themselves to survive. Intel memories->CPU , Microsoft anti-internet->pro-internet and so on.

I hate the way the retail industry works right now because it is so brutal to developers that are the very lifeblood of the industry. I believe there is a way that both retail developers and publishers can win if they get serious about it. Each year fewer and fewer titles come away with more and more of the market leaving all the other developers hanging out to dry. This leads to bigger and bigger titles, with more and more marketing, while the other titles (and their developers) get marginalized.

There's a lot of money out there and your not going to stop people from going after it, but you might be able to affect change in such a way that the process is fair to all parties involved. I probably will never release a game in retail because I firmly believe online distribution is a far more efficient mechanism to sell games, but I’d like to see the retail industry open up and treat developers better just the same.

[12.13.02]


Wall Street Continues To Batter Game Stocks

It's been a rough week for videogame stocks, and today the carnage continued on Wall Street. Yet another analyst took a swipe at the game publishing sector, downgrading a number of publisher based on the belief that game sales will not grow as fast as earlier expected due to "weak consumer spending, slowing hardware sales and pricing pressure on software".

The analyst, Chris DeBiase of Goldman Sachs, downgraded Activision, THQ and Electronic Arts to "underperform" from "in-line". He said that recent sales data from NPD pointed to just 7.3% year-over-year growth, well shy of DeBiase's expectation for a whopping 20-25% growth.

At midday, shares of Electronic Arts are down $4.60, or 7.5%, to $56.72. Activision is off $1.10, or 6.5%, to $15.72. THQ is even.

Originally posted by Dan MacDonald
The record industry also does not disclose any of it's accounting audits so there's no independent way to verify exactly how many units were sold and if the artists are actually getting paid.

This really isn't all that uncommon, unfortunately. Soundscan(i believe thats the name. the ones who track music sales) isnt all that old, and before them there really was no way to tell who sold what. Books still don't have a centralized sales tracking service (otherwise you would see countless Danielle Steele novels on the New York Times best sellers list). Gaming has the NPD but they are getting less and less useful since they don't account for a large number of sales, including units sold online, or in stores like Electronic Botique, Wal-Mart, Babbages and so on. The reason places like Babbages and EB don't get tracked by the NPD is because then they're giving competitors market research information about their own customers, understandable. Personally I think it's pretty sad that we need to have completely seperate organizations just to track sales data, and that you have to pay an arm and a leg to see the number. I can understand paying for consumer research but sales numbers shouldn't be in a lock box.

This goes for independent developers and publishers as well. The only thing hiding sales figures does (in my humble opinion) is harm the independent market. Who knows what sells? How do I know how well a game like Pontifex sold? If it sold well then a developer could go about trying to figure out why it sold so well on their own time(market research). If it sold 50 copies then maybe I could do some research and see why it sold so poorly. If I think it sold well just because it got good reviews then I could be way off base and am putting yet another clone into the market which gamers interpret as "great, more of the same crap." Anyway, if people wish to hide sales data then that's fine but they should'nt talk about doing things for "the good of the indie community."

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=581&e=3&cid=581&u=/nm/20021221/tc_nm/tech_videogames_dc

Just another example of how broken the retail industry is.. how much longer can they last??

Jesster is doing well with his game Smuggler. And that is a strategy game. I think you need to go for the high quality. Because, there are Arcade games like DX Ball2 who sells well. But they are of extremely high quality. So it isn't true that puzzle games got the best oppurtunity to sell as shareware. But this question is interesting, why can Jesster live very well from the earnings and Cliffski, also target at strategy games, not?

Is it the quality of the demo gameplay, art, etc?
Bad marketing, not a friendly orderpage/website, little submissions to download sites, reviews, etc?
I don't have a clue.