The advent of digital distribution, particularly in the mobile market, has enabled developers to distribute their own games without the need for a publisher, much to their delight.
However, founder of EA Trip Hawkins believes that that is changing once again, with the flood of games available on app stores making publishers necessary once again – to help these individual games stand out in a sea of competitors.
“When Apple launched the iPhone, when Facebook launched their app API, when Android and Google Plus followed suit, you started to see all these offers where ‘Hey, if you’re a developer, just come to me. You don’t need a publisher,'” he said.
“I think that honeymoon is ending now because if you have a million apps in an app store, just because your app is in an app store, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be discovered,” says Hawkins, whose current venture, Digital Chocolate, is a mobile app publisher. “So you’ve got issues about how you’re going to bring traffic to it.”
We’ve already seen this kind of thing in action, with indie developer Spry Fox allowing Disney/Playdom to take over publishing for the Facebook version of their social puzzle game Triple Town. As publisher, Disney promoted the game and handled scaling issues.
Hawkins also calls into question the 30 percent cut these platforms take from the revenues, suggesting that they don’t provide the same kind of service you get in a physical store, namely employees that direct shoppers to products that match their interests.
“Retailers in the old days not only solved the distribution problem, they solved the discovery problem,” he says. “In the very beginning with iPhone, with Android, with Facebook, they also solved the discovery problem because there wasn’t much there. As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they’re no longer solving the discovery problem.”
Hawkins continues, “As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they’re no longer solving the discovery problem. They don’t really in fact deserve 30 percent of the value chain anymore. The 30 percent number is kind of arbitrary. … That number makes no sense whatsoever anymore.”
This discovery problem may force developers back into the arms of publishers who can promote their game. “I think for developers increasingly, they’re going to have to try to then figure out, ‘Well how do I get my discovery problem solved?’ If they can’t finance it themselves, then maybe they need to partner a publisher that’s good at it.”
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