We have been offered a publishing deal with Cosmi Europe (www.cosmi.com) for our game Shift 247. I was wondering if anybody has had any dealings with them before or any other information apart from what is on their website.

If you don't wish to post here then please email me at mail@addictive247.co.uk

Cheers!

Cosmi is one of the big budget publishers worldwide. They sell worldwide in many units, more then the competition.

Is there offer to sell your game as a stand alone CD-ROM software package or do they want to add your game to there compilations, like Top 50 Blazing Windows 95/98 Games, or 201 Action Adventure Games, 201 Solid Gold Games, 300 Best Arcade Games for Windows, 1000 Best Games for Windows.

What is there offer in royalties?

Not sure if it's going to be stand alone or on compilation CD. I'm just waiting to hear about that. They offer 10% of net sales. As they only contacted us today I'm still asking questions.

Hmm... I think that in the case of 10% of net sales, they are interested to put it on there CD compilation(s). eGames also offers that kind of deals. If the game was sold stand alone, the royalty is mostly about 25% or higher.
Good luck with the deal!

Thanks for the information. I'll let you all know how it goes.

Congratulations! You should ask them about what the marketing budget will be, and where it will be marketed.

10% royalties isn't too bad, though it might be a bit low for a finished, known game (though I don't know if any major publishers are really offering 25%).

You might also want to get some idea of what's included in 'net' sales -- that can be a real sinkhole sometimes. Depending on how much you want the contract, you might also want to negotiate either a minimum payment or a higher percentage.

Good luck in any event!

We've just heard back from them and Shift 247 will be on a stand-alone CD - which is good news. They will also promote it worldwide and want it to be put in a couple of different languages.

Hi Addictive,

I want to congratulate you very much, because if this will go very well, you must be think seriously that this can be the first step to go full time as an indie developer. If everything is worked very well out, I think your future will be very nice and clear as a full time development studio. How big is your team by the way?
Cosmi is very strong in marketing/promoting and distribution. They are stronger in sales then eGames, Valusoft and other budget publishers. They even competete very well against the big publishers like Microsoft. They got a very while ago numbers about the sold units of software from each publisher, and Cosmi was very well presented as one of the best publishers. I agree that 10% isn't bad for worldwide sales. But 25% is more clear for standalone software. But it isn't smart to tell this to the publisher, because this can of course end in turning the deal off, by the publisher. So I think the best thing you can do is to agree, of course you need to read the agreement first. But this kind of chances are very little. So you need to go for it. If things are going well. You can get Cosmi easier interested for your next product.

Again congratulations!

Hi Smit,

Thanks for the congratulations - much appreciated. It's extremely early days yet but we hope that things will work out for us. We'll keep everyone informed of our progress.

Oh yeah, to answer your question there are 4 of us who make up Addictive 247.

Some small feedback I got from a friend that used Cosmi.

Make sure they are doing the best they can for your game. Cosmi is a big publisher and sells loads of games/collections. This can be very good for a small developer to get into thier 'web'. The problem is, from those hundreads of games out each year (or whatever the number is), only 4-5 get decent sales. If you have one of these titles, then its all fine, and you will get a very good ammount of money, but if your game is on the 95 other list, beware. Cosmi will still sell your game but wont push it to sell (marketing for example). They usually get a title and go through the usual process of marketing and selling. Then depending on sales, they either boost it or basically drop it (still selling but its like 'we have copies, we will sell them, but we don't give a damn).

In any case,
congrats :)

You might try for a clause that reverts all rights to you if they don't spend a certain amount per year marketing it and/or if the sales drop below a certain amount. Essentially, you don't want them to be able to prevent you from doing better with your own work than they are doing.

Are the cosmi deals exclusive or non-exclusive?

It looks like it's an exclusive deal but we can still sell the game on our own website.

I know from eGames that if the game doesn't sell the first year in units X (I don't know how much X is unfortunately). They will stop selling it the next year, because it isn't profitable. So the game need of course get break even and it need to make of course the profit to continue the distribution etc. So if the sales results are after the first year negative, they won't continue. But again they won't invest in a game if they got any doubt that the game won't make any profit. So I think this is a good chance to go for it.