Tonight I'm thinking about the downloadable game market food chain and my little spot on it. This has been prompted by an ongoing discussion with a large game aggregator - basically a submission service to portals - that I have found rather frustrating.
A little back story is probably in order. I attended a game conference about 6 years ago, while I was still working at Cryptic Studios. Can't remember which one but it was probably GDC. While there my pal and I stopped by a new company, new to me anyhow, called RealArcade. These guys had set up a service that would take simple games that people had written and sell them on the internet. I've always had kind of an independent streak so, even though I had a good job, I talked to the guy a bit to find out what the deal was. The deal was that you would write the game, pay for the artwork and sound, and they would take it, sell it from their website and give you half of the money earned. No front money, no advances, nothing... I thought that was crazy and quickly wrote those guys off as going nowhere fast. Besides, who would want to buy games off the internet that small teams had written in a year or less when they could have the output of small army sized studios with budgets rivaling the GDP of small 3rd world nations... Where's the business in that I thought... Well, turns out that RealArcade have done just fine. In fact, the RealArcade's of the world now pay between 25-30%, after deductions, to the developer and spend most of their time turning down game submissions.
So, let's fast forward to now. Some of these large portals don't talk directly to developers and will use aggregators to get their products. No skin off their noses as dealing with cranky developers takes time and the aggregators take their money from the developer. One of these very large portals (many millions of visitors per month) works with an aggregator that wanted Real E$tate Empire. Great news, I thought, some exposure on a large portal couldn't hurt so I decided to work with the aggregator even though their primary job is just to put the creators together with the sellers. You know, capitalize on their relationships... Not so fast. This aggregator won't let you have the keys to the kingdom unless you also let them submit your game to just about every other portal on the planet - for which they will take a cut almost equal to what you get. Unbelievable? You know what they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Nice work if you can get it.
So. I'm not in a position where I absolutely have to cave in to that kind of thing... but most indie. game developers do. So, next time you are about to buy a game from a big portal... think about actually going to the developers site directly. In some cases it can means as much as 6x the earnings for the folks who actually made the game and very few of us are actually getting rich. In fact, lots of indie titles don't even recoup investment. Think of buying direct like a trip to the farmers market.
And, by the way, for all of those who have made it to the Rusty Axe website to buy Real E$tate Empire... thanks. It's been gratifying. Like I said, nobody is getting rich over here but the game has been well received and the sales are appreciated. I hope y'all like the next one too.
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