An Indie Developer’s Guide to Publishers

I’ve made a bunch of indie games over the last 15+ years and have had my fair share of dealings with publishers, and I’ve also heard a LOT about publishers through other indies in private channels. Talking to publishers is one of the things I get the most questions about, even from developers I would consider pretty established, and I realize that part of the reason for this is that there’s just so little information out there about that side of game development. So I wanted to talk a bit through what I know about indie games publishing in the hopes that it will help people out there to navigate the space.

This will not include information about specific publishers or deals to keep people’s info confidential. I’m only going to go over the absolute basics; every developer-publisher relationship has unique circumstances.

What Does a Publisher Do?

When you’re working on an unreleased game, you’re basically making a really cool folder on a computer. A lot of people might enjoy having access to that folder, on any variety of devices, but until it’s released it’s just a folder on your computer. A publisher’s job boils down to figuring out the optimal plan to make money off of that computer folder, and then executing that plan.

This takes a lot of forms. Typically publishers will market your game, ie. buy ads on websites, contact press, send keys to streamers, and send emails to a lot of people in a newsletter. They will also talk privately with big platforms like Nintendo and Steam and Sony about giving you cash or ad space or sales in exchange for putting your game on their console. A good publisher has consistent, long-term relationships with platforms like these.

The other main role publishers tend to play is financing. Basically a publisher gives you money to help you finish your game. Then the publisher makes their money back by selling the game, plus a bonus, and you get the rest.

Some publishers will also offer services like Quality Assurance testing, and might take on a more hands-on role with advising game design/direction or creating a development schedule and enforcing milestones. You can look at contributions like these as a way of contributing a resource other than money, but ultimately these types of contributions would be represented by their monetary value when it comes to putting terms on paper.

Once they get to a certain size, publishers have exclusive access to larger opportunities than individual developers do; for just one example, it’s pretty common for a store to run a big sale of just one publisher’s titles (“Devolver sale!” “EA sale!”). This larger size also helps them weather difficult storms; an individual game has a low chance of success and can easily bankrupt a studio, but if you’re a publisher managing multiple releases a year, 1 hyper-successful game can pay for 10 failures.

Finding a Publisher

Every publisher specializes in different things and tends to work with different sorts of games. Do your research. The ideal publisher is one who has achieved success selling a game that has similarities to the one you’re making. If possible, try contacting developers who have worked with that publisher and ask them for advice. You don’t want surprises.

Working with a publisher who is relatively new can be a big risk. If they have few or no past developer relationships, it can be really hard to gauge what they’ll be like to work with or what they have to offer you.

Most publishers have ways of contacting them on their websites. You can often find their developer relations folks on Twitter and their DMs or emails are often open. Don’t be afraid to follow up after a week or two if you don’t hear anything. Most medium to large scale publishers are taking pitches often, so with enough reaching out I think any developer can expect to get at least the opportunity to pitch their game.

If you or your game reach a certain level of visibility, publishers will come looking for you. Any developer who makes a popular Twitter announcement, crowdfunding project, etc. is sure to have publishers flocking their DMs (even if they’re signed already). I would consider this scenario ideal, if you’re comfortable announcing your game while it’s still early in development. Of course, if you can get a lot of visibility without a publisher, then it kinda calls into question what value they’re offering you — but that’s what we call leverage. You might be able to extract a better deal from them and you can also skip a lot of steps in the process.

It’s super normal to be in touch with multiple publishers at the same time when you’re in the phase of seeking one. Don’t be surprised if a publisher takes weeks, or even months to get back to you, even if you were already in the middle of a conversation with them. They’re often looking at a lot of titles at the same time and it can be very competitive to keep their attention. By the same token, if you do end up getting an offer from someone, there’s no rush to accept it right away — you can use that offer as leverage to give other publishers you’re talking to a chance to offer you something better. Success attracts success; if you can get one publisher interested, others will suddenly be more interested in you too. You can often get a better deal by playing them against each other like this. Depending on how much of your life you want to spend on business emails. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself anyway, because usually you won’t be looking at offers until you’ve spent some time…

Pitching to Publishers

Every publisher’s dream pitch would sound something like this:

Here is a multi-million dollar game idea. We assembled a team of people who know how to make it, we have a plan on exactly how we will do that and how long it will take. Please give us some money?

Your pitch probably won’t exactly be that, but it’s worth thinking about the big key points.

• Summarize your game in ~2 sentences. “[Successful Thing] plus [Clever New Hook]” is a very pitch-friendly way to talk about your game, and even if you don’t typically think of your game that way, it can be very helpful to find what that angle is on your game for the sake of pitching (and marketing, if we’re being real here).
• Who is working on this game and how can you make them sound as likely as possible to be successful?
• What are similar games that have made a lot of money?
• How long will it take to make?
• Some gameplay footage is typically a minimum requirement, and most publishers strongly prefer to have a PC build of the game which they can play. Some developers find success creating a “vertical slice,” or a playable version of the game which is very short but an accurate representation of what the finished experience would be like (gameplay, visual, audio). I have heard of games getting signed with just a good pitch deck and no build, but it’s not typical.
• Having pretty art to show helps a lot. Publishers are used to looking at ugly unfinished games, but they are ultimately human and will tend to prefer a project that looks nicer. If not finished in-game art, some good and representative concept art goes a long way.
• “I need money to make these things, which is why I’m going to a publisher. How am I supposed to impress them with things that I can’t do because I don’t have money?” — yes. I’m sorry. A running theme here is that the games publishers want the most are the ones that need publishers the least. All I can say is that if you want to woo them, your goal is to look like you don’t need them.

Speaking of, there’s one more key point you need to hit in a pitch, and it’s this one:

• How much money do you need?

The “How Much Money” Question

I can offer you a clinical and mathematical answer. This was shocking for me to learn, but apparently it’s standard — or even considered kind of a low-ball by some— to ask for $10,000 USD per person per full-time month of work.

So, if you plan to have two people working full-time for two years, it wouldn’t be unheard of to claim a budget of (24 months x 2 people x 10,000 big ones =) $480,000 USD to make your game.

You also want to factor in any other expenses to your budget. Some standard ones:

• Porting — It’s pretty standard to budget about $50k for each console platform you port to. Expenses can be much higher or lower than this depending on your relationship with the porter and the size of the game, but if you haven’t started and you don’t know then this is a standard guess.
• Localization — the price varies wildly by wordcount, but if you’re making a game with a ~25k wordcount (my rough guess for games like Celeste & Neon White) then you want to budget about $2,500 per language. A game with ~80k words (Wandersong, Chicory, Night in the Woods) will be roughly $8,000 per language.

A lot of publishers are backed by big investors and will regularly sign budgets in the millions of dollars, so don’t be shocked if that’s what your budget looks like after this calculus.

When you’re doing crowdfunding, you often want to pick a “goal budget” that feels like an appropriate sell for your game, regardless of what the actual cost is. However, when you’re talking to a publisher, you need to be as brutally honest as possible, and in any case where you’re uncertain, you need to round up and assume the highest possible cost. Publishers are used to looking at big numbers, and you need to make absolutely certain that you actually have the money you need to finish your game. Once you sign the deal, that’s what you’re going to get, and running out after that can put you in a really difficult negotiating position down the road & also makes you look disreputable.

I have to be honest here and say that I’ve never actually taken a number that looks anything like these from a publisher. Partly it’s because I do a lot of roles myself and don’t need a lot, partly it’s because I’m scared of big numbers, but it’s also partly because I’m scared of some of the hidden consequences of big deals. To put it simply, the more a publisher gives, the more they expect back. To understand this best, it’s probably best to understand a bit about…

Navigating Deals

Generally a given publisher has a standard contract they offer to developers, and negotiations always start from that contract. Raw Fury famously made their contract public, and it’s pretty “average”, so that’s a great piece to look at for reference if you’re new to all this. The linked article here breaking down Raw Fury’s contract is a really good dive into how someone should look at these deals, so I’ll just offer some disconnected thoughts by bullet point.

• The bulk of text in a contract is often going to be dense legalese designed to protect the publisher in the case of something bad happening. This is the most boring stuff and also the stuff you need to pay the MOST attention to. If possible, hire a lawyer to look over it once for you.
• For example, try to look for clear terms on what the publisher does and does not own. Vaguely worded contracts can accidentally claim to own your Intellectual Property, or hypothetical future platform ports of your game which you haven’t negotiated for.
• Try to imagine different extreme scenarios and what would happen in them. What if someone on the team dies? What if the publisher ghosts you and just stops responding? It’s not uncommon to find scenarios like these in the contract that can benefit the publisher massively.
• To put it another way, when looking at any legal document you would do well to read it trying to imagine all of the most hostile ways it could be used against you — no matter how much you trust the other party.

• There are a lot of sneaky ways that publishers can inflate what they claim they spent on your game, which in turn means they recoup more money before paying any back to you. If the agreement says that additional spending goes toward the publisher’s recoup rate, then get information on what exactly they are spending money on. If there are expenses included that can’t easily be itemized, like “marketing,” I would be cautious. There are a lot of ways a publisher can twist the definition of something vague like “marketing” after the fact to claim spending on your game that they didn’t actually do. Suffice to say I have heard more than one horror story about a publisher taking advantage of a developer in exactly this way. When in doubt, try to get hard numbers on the contract so there are no surprises — like a maximum marketing spend. Or take a worse royalty rate in exchange for those expenses being eaten by the publisher instead of you.
• I try to avoid any deal where publishers keep 100% of the game’s profits at any point in time. For example, many deals will stipulate that a publisher keeps all of the game’s sales until they make back whatever they invested in it. This super sucks. If you don’t get lucky and your game doesn’t make back what the publisher spent on it, you could never see a cent of sales after releasing your game, and that’s very demoralizing. I would always try to negotiate SOMETHING, even if it’s a pittance like 10% royalties, just to have something. One developer I know got around a clause like this by having the publisher recoup their sales only from specific platforms.
• Royalty rates vary wildy. I wanted to give some helpful ballpark numbers but it turns out they exist literally all over the map. Apparently a 50/50 royalty rate is about standard. The amount of royalty you can expect can be dependent on the amount of money the publisher invests; projects that take less than $100,000 should hope for a publisher royalty closer to 30/70 in favor of the developer. Although rare, it’s not unheard of to see rates as low as 10/90 or 15/85, especially in cases where the publisher is more hands-off. On the flip side, games that take in many millions of dollars from a publisher might be lucky if they even get to keep 30%.
• Always remember that publishers are big entities with LOTS of money. Know what you’re worth, and push them on everything. Pitching is the time to be nice, but during the period of contract negotiations I always become insufferable. You only have one chance to extract a good deal for yourself.
• Related, but distinct, don’t be afraid to ask for something unconventional if it suits you better than their standard or starting offer. When I signed Wandersong with Humble Games, I took a relatively small amount of money, gave them a relatively small percentage, and signed them as the publishers of the game only on console, keeping sole rights to the game on non-console platforms. I tend to prefer low-input low-output deals like these because I get exactly what I need and benefit a lot from the future and ongoing success of the game.

Conclusion

Your ultimate goal in all of this should be to create circumstances where you can live happily.

If you’re happy to get a lot of money to make your dream game, and you don’t care about what happens after it comes out, then you might be happy signing away most of your royalties to get a nice pile of money now. If you need money to finish the game but you don’t want someone else to own it, you might just want to work with investors directly, a la Kowloon Nights or Indie Fund. If you just want help making your game get noticed, and you don’t really need money, you might be happier working with a PR firm to spread awareness of your game and avoiding publishing deals altogether.

Good luck.