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uh hello guys uh welcome to our today's podcast and today we have with us a special
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guest it's uh scott miller from a ceo of a company called fairdemic
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they are a publisher who works with horror games and he's
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going to talk a little bit about his career a little bit about the way the games are distributed right now how to
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get into publishing and how to work there and he's also going to share some tips for developers who want to publish
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their own game greetings and welcome to the 80 level roundtable podcast
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in each episode host karel tokorev invites video game industry leaders to
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talk about the world of game development no topic is off limits as long as it
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relates to video game development new episodes are in the works so remember to follow us or subscribe and
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share with someone you know will also enjoy the podcast i have a couple of questions for you
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scott and uh maybe we can start with like a little introduction
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yes i i mean we can talk about feardemic obviously we can talk about um um you know
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my games career and but i had this powerpoint presentation that i did ages and ages ago and i certainly don't have
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it with me now but um and it was called build your own bethesda and it was kind
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of about how to make a uh uh uh a um an independent game style tell us about
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that tell us about that it sounds amazing bill your own bethesda well yeah cause i mean you know i
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suppose one of the things that a lot of people have kind of forgotten over the last few years is the value of
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publishing services i mean we talk to developers all the time about um
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you know you know us publishing their game or looking at their game and and we come
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across a lot of skepticism about it and because i mean you know look at the end of the day everyone can publish a game
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themselves they can put it up on steam they can press release and offer it goes and so why would you want to share your
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your revenue with with a publisher and um but these these publishing services are really
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really important and they're becoming even more important with uh um
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uh the barrier to entry to game development you know becoming lower and lower and lower and by that i mean you
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know the tools to make games are literally download and start and and start making
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i mean you know the unreal engine unity is all uh free and so you can make a
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game relatively cheaply with just your time and then it comes to publishing it on
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various different platforms getting it out there working it across the life cycle of that game and of course you
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know marking it marketing it getting it in front of as many people as possible and um you know so so all these things
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are really critically important and one of the other um things that that i i had come across last week was um i had i
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spoken to many venture capitalists and they're all going you know no no we're not interested in publishers we're only
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interested in games as a service and we're going to invest in those things and that has been the story for the last
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you know perhaps you know two three years and you know millions and millions of dollars uh have been invested in you
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know companies with only one ip and those are starting to release now and a lot of those are starting to release now
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and i was speaking to a rather large venture capital company the other day and he was saying yeah well it's not
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panning out very well because you know people are taking taking these monster bets on one game and so and when that
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game doesn't actually uh sell um you know where do you go i mean there's no
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there's no uh doubling up but in the game of publishing of course you have uh
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uh grouped together titles and you have a backstop should one in your games not
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do as you uh as you expect you can always move on to it to another game and that has always been the the business of
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publishing whether it be movies whether it be books whether it be uh um you know
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games or music uh anything in entertainment it was grouping products together to have uh uh
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and grouping those products together so that you could leverage the the entire range of products to
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promote each individual product interesting so finally you mentioned
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bethesda because my favorite story about bethesda is when they released the terminator game
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and at the same time its software released i think it was doom
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and at the time like when they were compared and competing on the market doom obviously became this uh cultural
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phenomenon but at the end of the day further down the line bethesda actually acquired its software
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and all the attack and all the brands and all the other so that just goes for you know publishing still wins and at
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the end of the day in some banner yeah and i think you know more recently
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i mean and and i mean there's still a lot of skeptics out there saying oh publishing's an old business but you know you have companies like tiny build
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um and now devolver which have just both recently in the at least in the last like 18 months or so
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are listed on the aim in in the uk and the valuations have been insane um you
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know it's simply because you know that again i mean they're a solid it's a solid business model yes it can go a bit
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wrong here and there but you know you always have um a catalogue to fall back
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on uh uh should you know your primary or your big hit of that year not do so well
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um but i mean you know so i i suppose and and for for smaller you
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know younger publishers i mean it's really really important for them to sort of understand what it is that the publishers do so perhaps we can we can
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talk about that so tell us about uh tell us a bit about fear damage because before the
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when i was preparing for the podcast i kind of checked out the website and it was my
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understanding that you guys kind of specialize in a certain theme
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maybe you can talk a little bit more about this and uh why this particular theme what makes it so interesting and
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so on yeah so so essentially feardemic is a publisher of video games and we publish
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across all platforms pc playstation five siriusx etc and um uh we
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we're a little different in that we specialize in a genre of horror and
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you know when we say horror um when i mean one of the things about the games industry which is pretty interesting
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actually is that we actually categorize genre by game mechanic as opposed to
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the narrative style so when you see sort of adventure first person shooter all those types of things on a graph uh are
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you sort of struggling to find horror and a lot of people sort of say to me you know why why are you doing horror
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such a niche business but actually i mean when you consider uh the narrative
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as horror and then you look around look at all the games that are sort of released every year uh almost about 30
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of them 30 of games would fall within this sort of a vertical that we call horror low
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intensity horror all the way through to high intensity horror and when i mean low intensity horror i mean you know
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um you know children's games like the adams family or even pe on roblox i mean that is a horror narrative game but it's
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aimed at kids it's a low intensity and then you've got you know the more high intensity games like you know dark
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fracture and uh uh um you know and this comes from this idea of our founder actually
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and and the company fedemic was founded by another development studio called bluebertine and uh uh we are and they're
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still our biggest shareholders in fact we're sort of you know in their office now um but uh uh and the thesis was to
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be the best in your your your area and they picked psychological horror and so uh layers of
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fear came um the observer came and they were all psychological horror games and they became extremely good at them and
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one of the things that that peter babiano the founder of bloomberg team sort of kind of wanted to do
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was take that experience that they had and the the the ip that they sort of you
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know gathered around the sort of expertise in doing it and um share that with our other developers around the
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world or small developers around the world that perhaps doing their first or second game and this is where feedemic
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comes in so if you can imagine bluebird team they focus on you know their own creative creative projects uh whether it
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be their own created ips or licensed ips um fedemic we do all the third-party
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publishing we look for projects all over the world and uh whether they're in los angeles whether they're in israel
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whether they're in here in poland and um we invest in those projects uh not only
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just with you know our cash but our expertise as well um given
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and you know bloopers expertise whether it be in sound design whether it be in you know getting certain plugins to work we can
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provide that assistance to make sure that um at the end of the day that developer is going to deliver a game
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that they want to deliver you know it's not of course you know art is art you know it's not really always a given
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especially with um smaller smaller teams and you don't really know what you're going to get at the end um and hence why
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you know it's great to sort of have a as wider catalog or larger catalogue as you
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can to ensure that you know some of those some of those games you know that actually get released actually make it
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uh to a wider audience so question um
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why horror like if you can talk from a publisher perspective in terms of
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um you know revenue maybe sales numbers and so on when you think about horror
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games i think about games like maybe bloodborne maybe games like resident
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evil right um those kind of big titles
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silent hill a lot from japan most of them are from japan that image right so those are super successful
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titles like millions of copies sold um but i was under the impression that was
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more kind of um you know like a one brand story or something like that
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that it's not widespread um since you're doing this in this working in that genre like tell
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us a little bit about the some of the numbers or maybe some of the just general trends there
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yeah so um you know one of the uh the biggest platforms certainly to emerge out of um the uh
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uh the pandemic was you know roblox and um you know roblox were the darlings of
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everybody for in 20 2021 and the biggest game that they had on their platform was
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a game called piggy that game is a horror game without any question i mean it is a low intensity
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horror game um so it is a very very widely appreciated
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genre um and i mean as far as the size of the market goes i mean we think i
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mean again that you know getting the exact data because the the the industry doesn't follow uh the games industry
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doesn't follow games by narrative style they follow them by you know first person shooter adventure game simulator
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those types of things so i mean to do there has been some sort of narrative narrative sort of uh
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dissections that you can sort of overlay and then make some judgment but i would say and i certainly certainly you know
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the sort of watermark that we go on is that about 13.1 billion uh billion
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dollars a year uh in pc games and console games is generated from games that would fit within the um uh-huh
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within the vertical of horror to some degree i mean you know the medium is primarily an adventure game right so um
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uh but it is really a horror game so um we it's a substantial market you know it
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it is almost you know a little under a third of all you know games produced are
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you know um uh have a narrative thread that would easily be translated as
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horror now as to why horror um have you ever been to a randstein concert
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um you know if you if you sort of compare the sort of end user or the person that generally
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is hot interested in horror they're not dissimilar to sort of people that are
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interested into sort of you know alternative alternative sort of music scene they're very they're they're very
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um engaged uh and and this is one thing that blooper team found out and this was peter peter when i first met him he's
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explaining this to me saying look you know they're really really engaged and what we found is when we actually you
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know produced dropped layers of fear and and it started becoming a huge success they're
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really interested in following what you're going to do next they're really interested and engaged and open to what
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it is you're going to do next and um and what we've found over the past uh past
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couple of years as we've built the adamic as we're starting to sort of build our own community and um you know
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it's it's it's tough you know there's a lot of things out there distracting users but you know it's
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much easier when you have a user base that has sort of like these common interests that you can sort of predict
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what they are um it would be much harder for example trying to build an audience
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with general interests that are interested in say for example you know cars everyone's interested in cars so
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the more uh general those interests are the harder they are to pinpoint uh especially across social media today so
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um from a perspective of being able to understand our audience and you know carrying that audience along with you
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from game to game you know horror is a much more sort of robust um
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um robust narrative style to use and you know look it's fun i mean who doesn't
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like to be scared yeah yeah i mean i have a question um two rather um
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so one of the big ones is who makes horror games right so
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if you look at some of those titles you might think i mean what's going on there right
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but as you know coming from the developer side and knowing a lot of developers i know that i know the
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developers at layers of field for example so we did an interview with them uh a while back when the game was just
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uh being released they're just like normal guys that work
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in the offices the the subject matter is this right the the ghost and stuff but
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um it would be nice since you are a publisher if you could discuss a little bit about your partners like who are the
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companies that you're working with is there some specific region where more horror games are being made
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is there something specific about these kind of teams teams that you're
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partnering with that are building these kind of games um it's really general i mean you know
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there is horror fans all over the world and i mean and i think one of the things about layers of fear you know when it
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came out i mean i i think um you know bluebird team at that particular point in time was a small
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independent developer they nowhere near as big as they are today um they were quite small and they were known as an
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independent developer a small independent developer and they created this game um uh that
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sold or you know that that you know has over i think it's about three to five million users i can't i can't remember
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it is quite a large amount um and it's not just a game that everyone played it's a game or a game that launched
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blueberry team it really is a game that launched you know a million horror games because people saw saw
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what you could do and how you could tell stories with uh interactive projects to
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tell really interesting stories with not only just music and
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filmed content and but interactive content and um you know you could really
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use it to find emotions and really drag emotions out of your users and i think that is that is the sort of attraction
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of it is is because it there's something else there in you that you don't present to
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anybody else that you can sort of in explore using the medium of a horror
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game in the safety of your own in the safety of your own home it tells you as much about you as it
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does you know about um uh uh whoever made the game um and i think that's
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what's really interesting about it and you know we all understand what it is to be
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scared it's a basic human instinct and um you know if we
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can feel that we can control it with either a horror movie or a horror game i mean
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it's it's really kind of interesting and that's why people find it attractive and they find it attractive to make that type of product as well because the
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challenge is how can i provoke this emotion um in somebody else because i can't
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provoke pain using a computer game because i want to um you know i can't really provoke love
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it's that's a really you know a hard thing to do for even the season most
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seasoned storyteller but i can i can i think that i can produce that visceral reaction of fear
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um so it is um a vehicle for that and i i really do think that's really the
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reason why people really enjoy it i mean most of our developers you know hey they're just normal people
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they've got to work in an office as you say i said um you know they're they're they're interested in lots of different
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things some play classical music something yeah yeah it's not that they're they're all like
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ramstein fans and and so on so
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a question again um a little bit about development and then i'm gonna switch to publishing and
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distribution so there
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there's this idea but i'm i'm just gonna say uh in general right so it doesn't mean that it's true and you can maybe
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disillusion me or discuss it so that some of these games horror games are
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cheaper to make example so if i want to do a
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stylized project similar to let's say the legend of zelda
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i need to have a lot of guys crafting content creating visual effects
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very time consuming because it's almost everything done by hand you can't really automate it and all but then
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when i build something like amnesia i create an environment
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i create maybe one very gory scary character that chases me and then i just create spaces where i
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hide in the you know less time smaller team
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less money involved um is this true now was it ever true or
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it's just the same budget the same amount of time and it's not really it doesn't really matter well
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i mean i i don't think it's necessarily about the budget um as about the the creativity and the
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ability to actually use the tools in a way that can make someone scared i mean you know there is a lot of um you know
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interesting things out there that have been made on a low budget that are incredibly compelling and fun to to to
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experience um uh so you know it i i think you know generally speaking
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right in the whole games industry i think what is going to happen and you know certainly with the release of ue5
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um and uh you know we have we have talked internally about this particularly a lot of the game developers about you know
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thinking about okay what's the new project going to be and um you know a lot of them
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you know will say things like well all games are going to look beautiful within within five years it'll be really hard
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to tell a game on a low budget from a game on a high budget because the plugins the ray tracing everything the
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basic tools are there and they're all for free and so everything is going to look beautiful it's all really going to
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come down to your skill as a storyteller and as a game designer that's going to
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make the difference so the actual art style the assets and how it looks is not
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going to be as important uh as as it has done in the past you know in the past we
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all get excited about water or fire or something um uh whereas whereas in the
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future it's all going to look fantastic so whether it's whether it's a game that cost
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just someone's time or a game developed by you know uh 50 or 60 people the real
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key is going to be in the storytelling and that is um um you know the the
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that is the challenge for everybody and it's not certainly not dissimilar in in the in other
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in in other parts of the entertainment business as well i mean you know again um you know the cost of creating filmed
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content is
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is quite cheap um but you know it comes down to the story that you can tell how
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you can present it and the um the character that you can you can portray
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it's not um the quality of it uh everything's fantastic now
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um so it's it really comes down to that sort of that style and the quantity of
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um of games that are on the market i think it's like you know 19 games or you know
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on average or 20 games every day get you know released on steam so that over the course of the year is a huge amount um
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and you know the only way to overcome that is you know focusing on that sort of story and you know being able to take
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that take the user on a on a journey and it doesn't necessarily need to be
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you know the you know most amazing graphics or whatever it just has to be
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engaging and it has to be a story that they want to care about scott so let's talk a little bit about
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the distribution so i checked out your website you actually have a a store there where you can go
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and buy different uh games but this doesn't it doesn't seem like this is the only
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way that you're distributing your product no no no no no no to be honest it was an afterthought but
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yeah i thought so so how um what are like the main channels where
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you're selling i know that probably steam is very big maybe switch maybe some other
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platforms it would be very nice if you could kind of explain how our games are being sold
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right now and where so so finally i think a very detailed um
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discussion about this yesterday so essentially at the moment we sell directly on steam and we sell our
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playstation store the nintendo store and the xbox store um this is where the
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customers are this is um where they buy games everywhere else
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in my opinion is is kind of like um
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it's a whole other discussion um uh what i have found surprising over the
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last couple of years is that um there is still an appetite for physical
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games particularly on playstation now um uh we
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last year we did a collector's edition of dark and doing a collection edition a collector's edition of dark allowed us
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to put more in it and charge a higher price for it it's sold out um in
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as soon as it was announced and that was you know on playstation 4 playstation 5 and switch now we're going
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to do it again generally range it again now we're just going to deal with koch to arrange
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it throughout all the main mainstream sort of you know our stores such as media market here in uh
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in in europe uh in asia in australia those types of places you know electronic boutique because essentially
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at the end of the day i mean people are still going out and buying physical games and it
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you know surprisingly i mean a lot of my revenue has come from that uh over the past 12
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months as opposed to digital so you know when it comes to sort of
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planning your your game development thinking about okay well how am i going to sell it at the end of the day steam
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is a really really tough one because it's so noisy there's a lot of uh things
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going on there there's a lot of choice all the time there's a lot of you know discounting and price cutting the
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platforms once you get from steam to the playstation to xbox they become a
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little bit more curated if you like um because of the cost to get your your your your game on that
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platform and um when they're a little bit more curated it's a little bit easier to find a customer that's willing
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to buy your your your title um so uh you know our experience is you know we love
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the pla we love those platforms and you know we really focus our energy on those platforms um you know pc and that's you
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know with dark for example we don't do the pc distribution on that um uh uh
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unfold games does it directly we just do the consoles um because it's you know a
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nice uh thing that we can do and we are able to apply the skills that we've learned from bloomberg team from all our
26:13
own personal experience and apply it to getting the game to the the platforms and getting it well
26:20
or getting imported in in the best possible way scott so to kind of talk a little bit
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about the role of the publisher right and you mentioned that uh
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there's this um situation where people are like why are we sharing revenue with you
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what are you bringing to the table you share it with steam you share it
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with a publisher maybe with walmart then what are you left with right my question is like
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what are the skills and the things that you bring that uh ultimately help push more copies
26:58
and make more money for the developer yeah yeah i i think for for a challenge the the challenge is for a developer is
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to understanding what um uh what is required for them to make their game
27:10
successful and we see a lot especially over the last couple of years and you've had these sort of dedicated steam sales
27:17
where people you can put your unreleased game into that sale whether it be you know
27:23
packs or whether it be you know realms deep or or those types of things and you can accumulate this huge amount of wish
27:29
lists and a lot of people go you know i've got you know
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70 000 wish list 60 000 wish list why should i share that with you i've done all the work um and but that's one part
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of it that is just one one part part of it having those wish lists there and then trying to convert them is something
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else because usually those wish lists and uh you know they age and uh you know over the course of the development cycle
27:54
uh two three years um you know the people that wish listed your game early on and may not be the ones that
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buy the game later on down the track so it's it's a very complicated complicated sort of um uh um process that you've got
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to put in place so number one if we a publisher um uh so it's separated into
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two things first there's the marketing and there's a technical side so let's just focus on the marketing for a second a publisher should have a team of
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publishing uh of marketing staff and that staff we have uh now we have nine
28:27
people and that they handle everything from community to advertising to
28:33
building assets to making sure that that um you know we are mentioned everywhere from reddit all
28:39
the way through to you know all the steam communities across all the different pages and they're all connected and we're all talking to all
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the people on discord all the time and we're doing that constantly so that the
28:51
developers don't have to do that and the longer that we do that the more that we do that the better we get at it um you
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assume that companies like devolver uh uh have a great deal of experience in that as do do we because we've been
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doing it a long long time and it's like practicing it's like practicing anything you know
29:11
you get better at it over time we have better relationships with media we have better relationships with our influencers and we have better
29:17
relationships with the platform holders because we are constantly talking to them and we're bringing them bringing
29:23
them content um and that all has a huge value in greasing the wheels to get your
29:30
game in front of people now um um you know it's okay to go on realms deep and end
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up with seventy thousand uh um uh uh wish list but what do you do with them i
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mean you know who do you talk to at microsoft who do you talk to at sony it's really hard to uh no matter how
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well you're financed to go well i'm gonna start a marketing department i'm gonna start tomorrow and they're just
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going to focus on my game it it's really difficult from that standing start to do that and that's
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just all happening before release once you hit release you suddenly are in the retail retailing business
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and you know retailer or retail customers don't sort of all rush out on one day and buy the
30:12
game you know certainly some of them will maybe five percent of your wish lists well or seven percent of your wish
30:17
lists and then you've got to work that title over the next five years and that
30:22
means that you have to ensure that you can get it into boxes you can get it into bundles you can get it into sales
30:28
and it's constant constant constant and uh that is sort of the the job of a
30:33
marketing department in a publishing company to make sure that you are not leaving uh revenue on the table you've
30:39
got to look for it everywhere and you've got to consistently look for it and you know the general rule of thumb if you're
30:45
going to give anywhere between 50 and 30 of your revenue to a publisher you're
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gonna think well um i'm going to over time at least sell twice as many or three times as many at least at the very
30:58
least um at best their connections their experience in delivering a game to the
31:04
marketplace will you know give me a better chance at converting my you know lifetime work into a a a hit um you know
31:14
there's no guarantees of course it is a sort of a very fickle marketplace but um uh you
31:20
know you've got to give yourself as many chances as you can to find success and you know that's what a marketing
31:26
department and a publisher should do for you from the marketing point of view from a technical point of view of course
31:32
um there is a lot of things that a publisher can offer as well that last mile of localization of porting the qa
31:40
support all those things that you need to do and you know certainly a um a publisher like videmic
31:48
and our connection with blueber team allows us to sort of you know get access to
31:54
many um services that perhaps a a a standalone solo developer
32:00
is not going to get um or not going to know where to look for them um so um
32:07
so yeah and you know those technical services again have a lot of value whether it be just the porting expertise
32:14
um to the different platforms knowing how to do all the certification processes and making sure that um you
32:20
can you can have good open dialogue with the platform holders and explore opportunities such as game pass such as
32:26
playstation plus all these types of things are really important to getting your game in front of as many people as
32:33
possible scott this is super interesting that you mentioned the platform holders and your experience
32:39
working with microsoft sony on playstation and xbox
32:45
and i have this question so you mentioned that the market is very saturated
32:52
i mean 20 games per day there is so many games on like my playstation store i can barely see
32:58
what's coming out uh apart from this the the front page yeah on steam it's
33:04
just ridiculous and if you go on the switch or anywhere kind of the discoverability
33:11
process i would say it's uh still like in the middle ages somewhere
33:17
right because there's basically no information apart from the name and this little icon or
33:24
you know tile that you have with the so in this situation and these catalogs
33:31
how do you improve discoverability like what are the tools that you have that help you you know especially with
33:39
horror games because they it's difficult that's what i'm saying
33:44
it's wildly difficult i mean it's difficult to predict um anything these days with the with you know the way our
33:51
digital lives are shaped i mean you can't sort of manufacture something going viral a lot of the times and our
33:57
experience with dark has literally been um you know it it
34:02
has just been um being patient being um consistent and you know just
34:08
pushing and pushing and pushing all the time you know and you know interestingly enough i mean you know dark was released
34:15
on pc in 2019 i think um in late 2020 we
34:22
released uh the ps4 version and then ps5 and series x followed in 2021
34:29
and it wasn't until the final quarter of 2020 2021
34:35
that um uh you know it sold the most copies and even now today this last quarter that's
34:41
gone through we've had a phenomenal run with it because people are still are still discovering it we one of the
34:48
things that we did when we ported it is tried to make it as future proof as possible by you know ensuring that it
34:54
had haptic supports for the new uh the new consoles in it so that you know it
34:59
felt would always feel like a new game that it wouldn't date as fast and you
35:05
know i'm happy to say that that's kind of what's happened um and you know just just yesterday it won the webby award
35:12
for the people's choice other people's choice webby award for independent creation um and uh you know again that's
35:18
given a whole lot of other uh um profiles in the press room around
35:24
twitter i mean i saw a lot of things being shared last night on on twitter in regards to dark um so you know
35:30
it really is a marathon in some in in some respects i mean certainly even with
35:36
blooper teams titles they still continue to to sell and they continue to promote
35:41
them all the time and they continue to work those titles um over time and so
35:46
you know if you just walk away from something it's the the day after you release it
35:51
like we used to do um you know it it it just won't work you've really got to
35:57
work it over time now you've got to really focus on the life cycle of a product as opposed to the day one
36:03
it's interesting that you mentioned this and this and this multi-platform angle
36:08
because i remember the first time i actually played a game called hollow knight
36:15
was on switch and only later did i figure out that it was released several years
36:20
after it has been already released on pc and it was a huge hit there
36:26
but it blew up only when it went on a different platform
36:32
yeah i mean look i think that that's sort of happening more and more i think among us was another game that um you
36:37
know it it it took a while for it to find an audience um you know i think there's
36:43
just so much going on out there in the world there's so much content and you know i i was reading well i was
36:49
listening to a podcast the other day an expert on um you know filmed entertainment and he was talking about
36:55
the top five streaming companies were investing 130 billion dollars in
37:02
in content this year there's just not enough credit cards in the world to pay for that you know it doesn't there's
37:08
just not enough subscribers to go around um so not only is film content getting saturated game content's getting
37:15
saturated everything's getting saturated so you've got to be patient now it's not a case of um you know back in the day
37:21
when we had tekken i mean you know it was all about the day one number and rolling it out um or dragon ball or
37:28
skyrim now it doesn't work that way we've had to rethink how we do this and how we approach it and um you you have
37:35
to sort of do it uh uh with sort of a a life cycle product life cycle in mind as
37:41
opposed to that day one number so have a let's go like a little bit in a
37:47
different street we talk a lot on our podcast and how do you start in
37:53
video game development right so where do you go you can start as you know like a tester
37:59
then do something else or an artist but how do you start working
38:05
as a as a in a publishing company like what are like the entry points there
38:12
and how you can can you grow yeah look publishing um here
38:18
is it a different is it a different mindset that you have to have when you go well
38:24
yeah i mean game development is all about um you know finding um specialists a group
38:31
of specialists to provide uh expertise as a group to create one product whereas
38:37
being a a publisher is being more a generalist and knowing all the bits and
38:43
pieces and how they all sort of sort of go together to affect an outcome uh you have to know a little bit about game
38:48
development and and sort of who does what uh so you can sort of understand
38:54
how that product gets to uh gets to release stage but you know if that there are you know the big
39:01
publishers and there's a lot of consolidation going on at the moment and um you know interestingly enough um you
39:07
know the publishers uh you know at the top levels at the in the executive levels
39:14
you know those people have been around for a while and um you know um some of them have been quite you know
39:21
uh uh famous others not so but um uh you know that
39:27
there is a whole new generation of people that are sort of rolling through publishers at the moment and i think um you know it's a really fascinating you
39:34
know area to be involved with and one of the things that makes it so attractive
39:39
is the fact that uh you know every week you're dealing with a new product as
39:44
opposed to a developer that has to develop the same product for five years straight um
39:50
i know a lot of people sort of kind of burn out you know what one you know game number ones to be
39:56
hit so they're immediately developing the sequel and you know five years later they're still developing the same game
40:02
and they just want to you know throw the computer out the window um so but you know the great thing about publishing
40:08
and being involved in that side of the business is that you you are constantly dealing with new games all the time
40:13
because you know publishing is about building a pipeline and uh you know the bigger the pipeline uh the more products
40:20
you have going through through the more efficient that your your publisher will operate or will become the more
40:27
practiced your marketing teams will become the better the relationships that you have with the platform holders the
40:32
better the relationships you have with media and so on and so forth so uh it's a very very different type of
40:41
experience than just working in game development and game development i mean you know there's all game development
40:46
you know you can tell your own story and that's what it's that's what's great about it but with game publishing you
40:53
get to help other people realize their dream of telling that story so and
40:58
that's what it is being able to i mean i'm i'm the world's worst storyteller so i'm never gonna make a game uh i'm never
41:05
going to make a movie or write a book but i can certainly help other people realize their dream in
41:11
bringing their story bringing their their their world to to market
41:16
so i want to ask you a little bit of a question that we
41:22
kind of discussed with summer representatives when we were talking about streamers
41:28
uh and you know streamers right now is kind of like the one of the main avenues where you can
41:35
spread the word about your game and what they said is that they are very
41:41
peculiar about the audience and they want to have offers that kind of cater to that audience so
41:48
if i stream horror games i want to sell with an affiliate link or
41:54
something only horror games because that helps and it aligns with my audience
42:02
having kind of centered your detention attention at uh
42:08
horror in general as a genre does it help you sell more copies in in general does it
42:15
help you kind of find that sweet spot and uh push kind of more stuff out there
42:21
or it doesn't really matter you just kind of like to work in this space look it it is becoming ever more
42:29
important and i mean we we see it just in i mean dark fracture is a game that um is coming coming
42:35
later um you know we haven't sort of announced the release date yet but uh uh the demo dark fracture prologue which is
42:42
sort of the the story before the actual you know full game starts is available now for free on on steam and we see it
42:50
all the time the wish lists going up and spiking and down and spiking and every
42:55
time they spike we can almost certainly find a youtuber that has um uh founded
43:02
uh and you know played it for his audience and um you know the the resulting interest that we get straight
43:08
after that is just immediate it's it's amazing but you know one thing is is sort of
43:13
clear to me is that it's really difficult for us to go out
43:18
there and ask um streamers to support our new game or
43:24
play our new game because we don't necessarily understand their audience as
43:29
um as intimately as they do um and you know um
43:36
what i've found is that you know every time we have gone and sort of asked someone to play something new they sort
43:42
of you know how much you're going to pay me to do it because you know i i risk losing viewers if they turn on to my
43:50
stream at night and don't see something that they know um so it's kind of like a
43:56
two-way street and it's a very very difficult one um uh but you know they are super important
44:01
streamers and you know but i think that the key is you know not to try and get them to
44:08
uh play your game or push your game is to try and think about how do you make
44:15
content uh that streamers would enjoy and that their audience will want to watch
44:21
that is the sort of kind of the key and it goes back to what we're talking about before is you know that uh
44:27
if it's all about the narrative the storytelling and the game doesn't matter
44:33
um about the you know the quality of the water or the reflections or the light and the budget and how many people
44:39
worked on it it comes down to the story the narrative style and the thought process that's gone into the game as to
44:46
whether or not it's going to be something that streamers can use to engage their audiences with um
44:54
so and and this has been going on for for ages i mean i remember in the start of
44:59
my career i was stationed in korea and there was three tv channels at the time
45:05
uh broadcasting uh computer games 24 hours a day and that was all warcraft
45:12
warcraft and warcraft and starcraft um and i remember going in to see them saying look um you know we have this
45:19
game called unreal tournament and it's going to be fantastic we can make a tv show around it and uh they
45:25
just looked at me and said our audience likes starcraft you know
45:32
and um you know that was kind of that was it that their audience liked starcraft they kept on playing starcraft
45:38
for the for the next 10 years um because you know that that's kind of the human condition uh it's very hard to
45:45
introduce them to new content um and i see that with my kids as well you know
45:50
they're they're out watching streamers all the time and they will watch a streamer because he they know what he's
45:56
gonna play they don't wanna see something new they they just want to see what that stream is playing because they
46:03
expect that's what they're going to get um so it is a kind of really difficult one luckily i mean
46:09
dark fracture prologue has been out there for a couple of years now and um you know it it
46:15
it it satisfies all the needs of uh of um you know horror streamers in that
46:21
it provides the jump scares and the detention and it's nice and it fits with their format um so so yeah they're all
46:29
they inevitably will will sort of add it to their repertoire and you know we'll see the results of that but you know
46:35
other games that we've had and tried to go out and push to get streamers to play it really hasn't kind of worked for us
46:41
because the end of the day we don't know those streamers uh audiences and you know
46:46
people are people and they don't really like to see new things um they'd much prefer to see something that they're
46:52
comfortable with and familiar with um so it takes it goes back to again the the
46:57
the long term uh strategy of you know um uh bringing a game to an audience it's
47:02
not all about day one anymore it is a longer-term pursuit scott so we are
47:08
almost out of time but i had like this last question kind of recommendation i hope
47:13
you can give so if i'm a developer i developed a premium title
47:21
and i want to go to market so what are the three things that i absolutely must do
47:28
in order not to fail number one don't get too overly ambitious um because you know there is a
47:35
lot you can bite off a lot more than you can chew and you'll be developing your first game
47:40
for 10 years as opposed to you know one or two so be conservative and be realistic
47:47
about what you can do as a solo developer or even if it's like three of you or four of you be realistic about
47:54
what it is that you can that you can do and be thorough about setting your goals
47:59
so make your game designed document and and and stick to it like glue don't let the
48:05
let it drift so so that's number one number two uh
48:13
if you're focusing on game development think about adding a publisher to that mix there's
48:19
publishers out there that will help you um but make sure you've got a good relationship with that publisher and you
48:24
understand where they're coming from and how you fit with uh get into their roster of games and you
48:31
know how they're going to treat that game over a longer term um so and number
48:38
three well it has to be fun if it's not fun you know if if you're not enjoying making it
48:45
no one's going to enjoy playing it so you know it really does have to be um you know a labor of love or something
48:51
that you want to do rather than sort of something that you think you should be doing all right scott i think it was very
48:57
inspiring thank you so much for your time i will leave the link to the description uh in the description for the website so
49:04
people can check out your catalog and maybe isn't your game thank you so much
49:10
have a good thanks carol thank you for having me thanks for enjoying another episode of the 80 level roundtable podcast
49:17
check out upcoming episodes on the 80 level website at 80.lv join our career
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