Panel: What Are Publishers For? Getting the Most Out of Your Publishing Deals.

foreign [Music] [Applause] coming along we're going to be talking about you know the purpose of Publishers should they even exist and how to make the most of them we'll probably have a biased opinion on whether they should

exist or not there's a bunch of Publishers but today we've got like a really interesting mix of different types of Publishers so you'll hopefully be able to hear something interesting like varied but all of us agreeing with each other and doing the same thing or maybe we do we'll do the same thing you know but can you guys um maybe we can just go down and talk about and introduce ourselves who you are what your role is what your company focuses on so my name is Christopher I'm the CEO and co-founder of Handy games we are the oldest mobile game developer still alive and we transferred from Pure mobile game development publisher to cross-platform Publishers so we publish all kind of small mid-sized projects from small to mid-sized developers and we still have a lot of own developers but we realized we have a higher demand out there so we distribute games around

the world on mobile on PC on console on streaming whatever nowadays you're developing a game and you can really release a title around the globe but the only thing that changed is from we are coming from the premium we want to free to play games totally at funded games to back to premium so what we do is really pure premium game so we have a lot of different guys here still doing other stuff I'm happy that I'm on the mobile game side even in premium so that's quite unique and we were bought by th Gennady which is now part of the embracer group so back in the days when we were 18 years long our own developers self-publishing now we are still self-publishing plus publishing more together with a huge company behind so I think everyone knows who the embracing group is quite funny I can tell you

awesome all right I'm Daniel helmhold I'm the VP of growth and head of marketing at Big Fish games uh big fish has been around for a long time we've been making games for over over 20 years uh lived a lot of different lives and in our current orientation our focus is on free to play mobile games my background is is Google Kabam Fox next and Capcom and excited to be part of big fish as we focus on taking kind of the diversity of our history and pointing it towards the future you know the organization has done first party second party third-party development it's done publishing and uh and I think we we've tried to boil that down into the most efficient collection of those things now and so now focused on finding great Studios great games great teams that want to join big fish and working together to kind of fill in some of the areas that they need help and bring them on board so excited to be here

hey I'm Fernando uh Fernando Rizzo I'm from raw Fury you might know raw Fury we're mostly uh PC console publisher we do do some mobile uh our catalog includes stuff like that North and atomic crops and Norco Kingdom um basic Stockholm great company I joined last year and previously I was uh working with cluttered horse the PC games publisher and before that I was the founder and CEO of modern wolf so I've been in games publishing for quite some time and I like it hi everyone so my name is Lee Glen cran I'm a BB publishing of Samsung a Samsung with a real based new mobile developer publisher and investor games that we are interested to publish are established games so games that are successful in other regions we help them to exploit the minor Market potential which is by

the way at the moment the fastest growing Market both in players and revenue I don't know if you look at the state of the market report by data AI Saudi Arabia was measured there one of the only markets in addition to China that was growing during the last year and in addition to can I establish games we are also looking for games that are developed by experienced development teams that are lacking publishing power so we are helping them to publish games globally as well we are set by very International Leadership team so all of us who are working for the company have been working on big franchises I've been personally working over 10 years for that problem for angry plus IP we have people from King that has an experience of working with the Candy Crush Saga France size people from EA Etc are so very experienced team and we are here to help for the developers to find success not only for metal Market but also globally hey folks negotiating publishing deals

takes a lot a lot a lot of long time and there's lots of discussion that's why 20 minutes into the panel I get to begin introducing myself so these guys clearly have been negotiating many publishing deals because they they really know how to talk about hey I'm the same my name is Eric I'm CEO at do dreams where the developers of Drive ahead Drive ahead is a gladiatorial Arena racing game so you get points by knocking friends in the head with a car we self-publish on IOS and Android and globally Huawei app gallery outside of mainland China we also published Android China with my games that's with the Z not an S and Mika here is this wise uncle that I have in the game industry and I'm super excited that Santa soft is our publisher for IOS and Android in the Mina region and we're very happy to be in this past

program anymore great stuff thank you so it is quite varied isn't it like curve so sorry I haven't introduced myself yet we haven't even you know we're probably eaten so much time but I'm Bobby I work for curve games curve games is probably most similar to Raw Fury of this group and we focus on PC console games premium titles I'd say we're like I I like to think of ourselves as curve being like the OG Indie publisher for PC console games there's about 2 000 of us all in all right now about 600 who focus on art 1200 on QA localization under testronic Labs because we're owned by a group called guitarist group and then there's code games which is like a really small Elite outfit um I say neat you know there's people like me anyway so what are Publishers for what do you bring to the table as a publisher like what how do you pitch yourselves to

people who are considering self-publishing why would they come to you I think everyone can self-publish nowadays so back in the days when we started that was 25 years ago quite a long time ago there was not a possibility to distribute the games you needed the publisher you really shipped boxes around the world now shipping boxes is quite a complex still complex thing but it's not a must nowadays nowadays you can self-publish to steam you can self-publish to iOS to Android if you go down to consoles it's getting already a little bit more tricky there is still blazes out there where you are one out of whatever ten one out of 100 per day titles that are released and doing that on your own means a lot of work uh we are shipping enough titles over the last decade so we know what we

are talking about and nowadays you need to really concentrate on a cross-platform really so simultaneous release plus then also box is really Champions League I can tell you so for example handling one of the last titles that we release were shipped on the same day on every platform so really from console or pce and even streaming on one day plus really globally in Japan in U.S was a Nintendo switch version PlayStation version Xbox version that's champions league but this is exactly what you need nowadays it's like if you ship a game the eyeballs are exactly on the one single day if you want to get a lot of variables that's exactly what you need to do and that's what Publishers are used to if you ship a game every two or three years if you're fast uh then everything is new everything changed so the lessons that you learned

over the last decades is like change is there all the time so if you're a developer release the title six years ago everything is different so working with someone who understands what marketing means in games what distribution means and the game is there for a long time so we are not in hyper casual business where after one month you don't remember what game you played for we always sell stories at the end of the day together with the developer so developers need to understand that the Publishers there together with you it's not against each other I know some questions that you prepared it was like that is from the very old days it's like there's a developer there's a publisher do what we say that's a long time ago if you take developers seriously the developer takes you as a Publishers here so it's a partnership on on a specific project or on time and other times when

we sign a deal with developers it's over decades because a game is sold nowadays not in one year we had it before who has an app that is 10 years old for us that's normal we make still revenues from titles that we released 15 or 20 years ago so it's a never-ending story and you need to understand that a developer can make a shitload of money on the long run it's always a on the indie game Space it's it's a not a Sprint it's a marathon that you're going with us releasing a game is one really taking care of other gangs in the long run so normally Choose Wisely with whom you're working it's quiet open out there what every single publisher is doing what kind of titles they are looking for and check out what they can come up with on the table most of the Indie developers in my opinion they are looking for money that's the first thing to get the game not only on the runway but really start

it up there that's the most important thing and really it's about you only have one game of published in several games so combining them brings you again more power and then again it's still cool honestly as a developer to hold your game in a package it will not make you rich but it it's still your baby and you can grab it if you only release it on Steam it's like yeah it's there but you still cannot grab it it's it's different well I mean it's hard to be good at everything so recognize what you're good at and what you're bad at uh and find something that's complementary to what you want and the compliments you need for your organization are going to be different based on who you are and so I very well may not be the right publisher for you you need to find out who can fill in those areas that you aren't good at or that you don't want a touch of the 10-foot pole because there's a lot of things about making mobile games you might not like and that's okay that's why you need great Partners we look to be great compliments to folks who are

great at making games uh but maybe they don't have a large data science organization it has a subset of that that's specifically focused on marketing they might not know how to model out ltvs on UA to try and scale to multi-million dollar a month investment and they might not be interested in doing that so our goal is to find people where we can add value and together create a a greater success of a hit together then either of us could have could have done alone and by making games while also publishing games we believe it gives us a bit of insight into what it really means and the challenges of being developer so that we can empathize and connect authentically with the the games of the teams that we're publishing yeah if you feel like it's all been covered already yeah I mean just to give some color from for the PC standpoint like there's 250 games a week on Steam these days uh it's an enormously competitive landscape so if you don't have somebody completely dedicated to marketing who

really knows what they're doing right not like smart intern that you think might be good at marketing um it's worthwhile having a publisher I'll sleep with that okay well from our perspective we have like two value propositions so so I said that when Visa established games usually these companies are focusing for tm1 tier one market and they omit the markets of of carmena for the reason that it is very difficult Market to operate because first of all it's Arabic localization you have to flip your UI text is both read and written from right to left instead of uh left to right so there's a tremendous amount of work that you need to make for game to be adapted for the local market and that's where we can help for the established game companies and considering the current market where we are living at the moment where fundraising is quite difficult and finding resources for the U.N scaling uh

we can support that for for smaller developers to help them to find that success Global Market and we are in a good position at the moment for the reason that they can is growing in the middle region where maybe due to the energy crisis we are seeing Market declining in the rest of the world you're good all right so getting into the meat of the discussion now getting the most out of your publisher um I think what a lot of developers underestimate or don't appreciate sometimes when going into a partnership with a publisher is there is work still to be done because now you have a publisher right what is that stuff what stuff should people what should be on this you know on their mind when they go into doing they now have a pleasure great they're going to do the heavy lifting on marketing porting QA whatever but watch what kind of stuff

above and beyond making a great one yeah um often like people ask that well what should the publisher do for me like how do I choose a publisher but I think you should also ask a question that my organization [Music] how flexible is the tech stack how well have we been documenting things like Mika here mentioned markings do UA and then you start for the first time thinking that oh we never did a brand Bible because you know it's all in the head of the creative director and then also like I I think one really important thing is that you know how good are the production processes because if you're doing your own game and everybody knows the game and you're passionate about it then suddenly you have this external organization they might have some subcontractor

contractors or Partners working with them so we found that you know we had hired a producer just at the right time we started doing the Mina project with sound soft and without it we would have been in chaos or catching up to things so that that was really important for us I mean I'd say there's a few things that that devs should think about going into the process just building what you said right you should really know what your game is and who you're building it for before you actually start looking for developer or publisher funding and working with a publisher being able to hold on to that vision is what's going to make you a credible partner in the discussions about your product right and and Publishers are going to give you a lot of feedback and you need to be able to take that feedback and work that into the vision for the game that you're

ultimately the holder of um and that you ultimately owned the roadmap for uh the longer that game takes to ship the more money you're going to need from the publisher which means it's a longer period on the other side of it before you get into royalty so everybody benefits from getting the game out on vision and on time um the other thing this is maybe quite tactical but just think about what your publisher is going to need once it's time to start marketing the game have you thought about how you're going to get feedback from beta testers is that going to happen in game is that going to happen out of game do you have stuff like capture tools for getting screenshots hiding the UI you're moving cameras around to create trailers all of that stuff becomes really important further down the road and you don't want to start thinking about it three months out from release when everybody's hair is on fire and there's not enough time to do all the important stuff that's on

your radar so there's yeah Bobby's questions fundamentally correct right like there's still a lot that the devs need to to carry even when there's a publisher involved the publisher is going to make your life as easy as they can but you still have uh kind of water to carry in that relationship so I would say be honest to the publisher when you're talking to them so what you really can do and it's a partnership so talk in the beginning about all the topics that you want to take care of and honestly a publisher is not developing your game the publisher can assist you for example or assist you in topics that you are not aware of no matter if it's server back and localization so for example even localized handling in Catalan and I think in so many different languages and yes Arabic is another piece but it's just one of those tons of bees if you want to really go

abroad if that's your plan if that's a plan of the publisher and normally you sit together we have I know a lot of developers hate that but we have that on our website what you really want from a publisher and that's very important to understand upfront so you need to ask your team or your CEO or whoever is pitching the game what do I really need is it only money do I need marketing do I need QA because I can tell you I never found a single developer who has a good QA and as soon as you go on Console you need to have that did you really ship the title on those consoles out there not talked about it or yeah it should work at the end of the day that's exactly what we do but we need to know that up front depending on that we can assist you the same thing do you have a sound designer can you really localize the game not only on language but really about voice over because that's the next

step are you only an indie game or do you want to be a triple in the game that's the next thing do you really want to have orchestral music in there do you want to have a huge cool whatever video promoting your time do you want to have demos and stuff like that that's what you discussed in the beginning that's why we are sitting together with a publisher normally and discuss that step by step and believe me the whole plan is up 100 I never had that that we signed a game and it finished like we discussed in the beginning so Publishers are used to that normally and of course we put more money on the table to finish it I never say that but at the end of the day we know what is normal in publishing and I think that's what you should be prepared of as well because of course changes are coming there's a new console coming there is a stadia coming and there are options for Publishers for example or for the developer itself and normally that's the job of a publisher

to sell your game to give it to a bigger audience like for example in-flight Entertainment Systems when you were before here they were talking about it we did that I think the first time 2004 in-flight Entertainment System it's a nice business model still today same thing like car entertainment your game can go there you will not do that I'm quite sure about it but that's what Publishers offer new possibilities new way to make money with your titles and as I said we're in the same boat at the end of the day we invest into your game Into You partly and then find a way to get our money back make revenues for you that's a big job yeah I mean I think you can back it up to Why do you want a publisher so there's two schools I thought either you want a bag of money or you want a bag of money plus a bunch of tools that are to let you grow and scale your business so let's say you want the full service area so you want money and you want the tools well then if you aren't able to

pre-assess the tools that need to be integrated and recognize whether or not that's going to be possible then you're never going to get those tools and you're never going to extract the value you actually want it out of that publisher so those are decisions that need to be made when you're assessing Publishers and when you're just trying to decide if it even makes sense let's go to the other side you want a big bag of money to scale your business and do invest in UA well to allow for the scaled investment of UA you need to be able to speak the same language as the organization if you're being published by you need to recognize you have shared metrics and shared means of assessing and measuring the success of your game how do you calculate LTV how do you calculate row as what are we looking at in terms of payback period what are all the criteria that we're going to put out there so that we can make sure we get those Milestones to get you more and more money to scale your game and so if you are not integrating in a way that lets you continue to show the outside success of your game it's going to be very difficult to get that scaled investment on the UA side which is what both parties want we both want to make

your game freaking huge okay to do that let's talk the same language with the same Tech the same reporting and let's see how big we can make it together so yeah there's a lot of work to be done right um making a game whether it be preparing debug mode for trailers or whatever like integrating certain SDK scooters it's just an endless amount of stuff to be done but I think the kids making sure you're aware of what the plan is talking communicating being honest I think really helps and with that I think we're into the next one with communication what's going to happen is no doubt there's going to be some disagreements right um how should developers deal with disagreements with their publisher have you got like good examples of when there was like a disagreement but you dealt with that conflict in a way that became everyone one in the end uh if I can comment on that so our experience is that it requires both

partly full transparency so so you set the expectations based on the numbers that what you see you don't give any false expectations and you work together it's uh it takes to the channel so so it's not that publisher would be responsible for your product you are responsible for your product we are helping to grow your product and and this is an a very important thing that you build a relationship between the parties you are as transparent as you can about what issues you might have on both sides and you discuss and agree how to solve those and mitigate those risk points what you have the I always feel that when people say that hey we're we both want to grow this game they're really saying that I want you to do what I I think is right so so I think like there in order to not be in that situation there's a lot of there

should be this transparency on the performance and and then clear expected discussion of what's the expected goal so so I often like the I feel the conflict in these relationships arises when when you maybe rush things a little bit and and you know like you talk on very broad terms and hey there's massive potential many of us have heard this like imagine if one percent of everybody in China will play this game yeah so you know like but there has to be this there has to be a vision there has to be a realistic Target so our game our genre our Market what's industry standard good and do we have like is clear understanding together that this is how we're going to work towards that I also would like to maybe emphasize this long-term thinking that that uh in addition to understanding a good Target that you you you both parties

commit to doing something to to getting there so that you know like if initial results are are good then like you know that hey we're we're working on this on the long term term it doesn't have to be forever but we give this like a good enough run to see if we can succeed in the market I would say it's like a partnership at the end of the day so if my wife would tell me uh that's how it should work we can discuss that let's say that way and we find a way together and that's the same thing with developers and Publishers it's like as long as you're open and discussed that and yes a publisher normally ship more games than the developer itself so there is some kind of experience the thing is really like we can teach a little bit of that experience as a developer but there are some stuff that we cannot really teach them because they don't understand it and it's the same thing I have four kids it's every

developer is like a kid it's like you teach them that he needs to put the hand on the stove it's like it's hot there believe me I don't believe you okay now you learned and that's exactly how our game developer is working as well it's like you should tell them now you need to teach that it's a long process but it's a long-term Partnership if they understand it right they can learn a lot and it's a success for every developer alone to really ship again and that's what a lot of guys really misunderstand out there everything needs to be the hockey stick out there there are tons of game developers that never release the game I always teach that in University and stuff like that like first ship again and the second game will be better the third game will be better how many games for example an EA or Ubisoft shipped or distributed till they were really successful same thing here it's not the first title that you develop and

you will be rich I really hope you will get but that's not the case so even if you have a publisher there's still a chance that your game is not working and it can be the best game our Target is always about aiming for an 8 out of 10. that's the minimum that we should all Target and that should be very clear to the developer I don't need a 4 out of 10. that's not what we're talking and I think the expectations it should be really clear on both sides than we can achieve together quite successfully what we can do yeah I think accepting expectations early on sorry setting expectations early on I think is key because then you know what you're in for and as long as reality and expectations meet people are happy generally speaking right um okay at Curve by the way we did quite a lot of um we've got a lot of process in place to try and avoid the disagreements happening in the first place and it's probably like a whole hour session to just talk about that because I'll skip

it for now but um but yeah it's it's key how do you deal with conflict right especially when such a subjective world that we live in um right how can because the thing is a lot of developers do ask for funding number one thing we want funding and the other thing developers often ask was marketing capability or PR influencer Community Building how do people make the most out of that from working with you guys how would they make the most out of your capability to market the game whether that be in a specific region or globally what should they keep in mind I mean that's there's a few different there's a few different ways to approach that um I think a lot of folks would start to think about like how do you work with the marketing team but it should start a lot earlier than that right like a good publisher will have experienced producers sales people that

understand market trends right that have shipped hopefully a lot of games in the genre that you're working in that will probably have a lot of advice on how to make your product more commercially appealing uh the best marketer in the world is not going to ship too many units of a game that doesn't look good on the Shelf so to speak so listen to talk to and listen to the folks at your publisher that have that those sorts of insights and incorporate them into your game where they match your vision for it it really is a partnership and there really is usually a lot of expertise at the publisher you're working with certainly a raw fury like we've shipped 25 games at this point and and we're pretty experienced to shipping games in certain genres and we have a lot of folks that uh you know have have been part of a lot of hit titles they're worth listening to

and their insights and their and their gut feelings are usually pretty spot-on so definitely work with marketing but it's there's more to it than that think about how your product fits into the marketplace who you're making for what those people want yeah I think that's a great insight and I would kind of double down on that right if we look at the current uh ability to acquire users it's becoming more and more challenging more and more privacy regulation ATT there's a lot of challenges of going out and finding users the importance of creative and positioning and ensuring the marketability of your game is strong is more important than it's ever been in Mobile free to play what does that mean well it's much easier to change things earlier on in development than it is try and you know slap a new character on and I mean certainly changing art style like these things are massive overhauls and so the question is can you connect with a publisher early enough and can you be open-minded enough to having a data driven discussion about what is marketable about your game such that you

can recognize these are the things that are core to my game and they're not changing but I'm going to be open-minded to these pieces if it shows that the market could be more receptive to my product if I make these changes and you know marketers and product people have been struggling to have a version of this conversation for as long as product marketing has been happening and I think as a marketer it is my and my team's responsibility to bring data to that discussion and to also recognize how difficult it is to make a game and have that mutual respect but also orientation data because we all know if we get a fun to play game to Market but it doesn't resonate in the one and a half seconds we get to capture a user's attention when you see an ad it's probably never going to be a success and that's that's that's unfortunate if it's something that we could have addressed far earlier so I think that's half of it and the other half is just recognizing that UA is incredibly challenging both on the technical side and modeling side for actually allocating funds and it takes a deep discussion and an open one to say we want a scale investment these are the Milestones that we hit these numbers we unlock more budget this is how we grow together don't wait for those conversations to happen until later

let's have the hard conversations early let's get things baked into the contract so there's no ambiguity so that when we're operating together we spend less time quoting the contract and more time talking about how we optimize the game in its marketing my new job that might I so agree with what you just said talk early it's so important to talk about this stuff early so I think one of the big topics is also check out the publisher who you're talking to so there are some only you only have one producer for example we have two producers because if there is anything one is on vacation on an event you don't get information we have two we have a lead tester on that we have own marketing guys for that and you will get introduced to every one of them and you have some kind of guys within our organization with some kind of educating everyone about the game so that we can do early on the information when should we go show it on some kind of events should it be on the steam Fest now or

better a little bit later and stuff like that so it's really everyone was in such a huge organization of a publisher should know about the title it's really important and also then it's easy to discuss because I cannot tell you anything about QA I have experts for that I can tell you a lot about how to sell but not about how to sign it so that's why I'm forbidden to sign and check out new titles because that's not my job so be sure that you if you talk to one he's not the guy who signed the deal who discussed with you everything who is doing the QA who is doing the marketing there should be a whole team behind that because that's what you're buying into it's about I cannot be the expert in every field you told in the beginning and that's exactly that but we have all those and that's really important that's why you should check out the Publishers really yeah so like at Curve what we do is after your game is signed we do what's

called an integration meeting and you meet with all the people that are going to be working on your game including marketeers business developers like all the key disciplines and functions that we have within our publishing team so then you start talking about the marketing plan from day one you start devising it together and if you're interested and if you're curious you can be part of the vendor selection process of which PR companies we won't work with or whatever so the level of involvement depends on each partnership and how much bandwidth there is and interest there is from the studio that we're working with for that partnership but generally speaking I would always well I think having a curiosity as a trait is good at the behavior ask questions talk about stuff early make sure you set that expectation early so then you can maximize opportunity later on so you're fully prepared to take the opportunity on right next question then is we've got four minutes left oh my God should we go to q a from the audience in case there's any questions you guys can

do it like an MMA sort of thing does anyone have any questions all covered all right and one of the things I'm I'm kind of intrigued by because I mean I we're telling people always question paper oh okay I don't get to get my question in done um thank you for the panel by the way um what are the red flags you guys see in a developer that sometimes are a deal breaker um if you don't mind sharing for me one of the things is really a business model so we don't like free to play we don't like hyper casual and stuff like that we don't like betting no web3 and stuff like that what is really one of the big issues is who is behind there who who's really the team and if you're not working 100 on your game that's a no-go for us you need to be dedicated to the game and you need to

pitch the game because you need to pitch the game you depressed at the end of the day we can make the introduction we can make everything but it's about you the developer so that's it if you are really very shy we can take over that but it's way easier if the developer is talking about the game as well and we need a story to tell no matter if it's the story of the game the story over the studio or the developers behind that that's the most important thing oh very quickly number one red flag is reluctant to be a free-to-play company doing free to play reluctantly you have to be all in on free to play if you're going to make a great free-to-play game I mean similarly to that in in the premium space like know your genre like I shouldn't know anything about your genre that you don't you should have played everything that's broadly competitive to your game and you should have an encyclopedic knowledge of it

because you're going to be the subject matter expert on your game right so that means knowing your competitors too um from our point of view is that kind of unrealistic expectations what the team has for the game uh the market will tell the numbers will speak for themselves so so we trust on the numbers more than what we see on the on them perhaps on the slide deck uh I can also Echo that there's no way that you can publish this stress assets so so there needs to be a team behind the game because it is literally it's it's a symbiotic relationship that you are building so both parties will be benefiting out of that if they have vested interest on it well I'm not a publisher but I'll say something anyway so so we're a developer but I just want to say that uh in 1950s Peter Drucker the father of management

wrote that marketing the purpose of marketing is to create and maintain a customer relationship and I think that's the common ground with the game developers and when you have these conversations just try to gauge that what is the feeling here that is this a partner that's going to help us and challenge us and we can work together on the long term to to really grow and scale the game in the market so one more question let's go yes we're still waiting for Alex from Voodoo to arrive so hopefully he'll be here soon I will ask hello um is it better to make a game on cross-platform than just on mobile or just on steam or just on switch or whatever um and if so does it help get it selected by Publishers and then it will be implemented does he get a bigger team or does it get different presence within the teams on the publisher side so I would just really quickly say whenever you're developing a game decide how many

things you want to try and do for the first time so you can simplify some things and get really good at one thing so yes it's nice to have all those things but that might be more than you want to take on yeah it's a really crappy answer that you're gonna hate is it depends it depends uh if you guys are an amazing super experienced cross-platform developing Powerhouse of course you should do it for everything right um it just depends on where your comfort level is at a lot of Publishers will have really trusted or even internal porting resources we do at Raw Fury so it it just depends but definitely to build on what Daniel said right make sure what you're doing is right for the product because shipping a kind of good game on five platforms is definitely inferior to shipping an awesome game on 1.5 that's a champions league as I said it's really like not every developer is doing

it on their own so for example we have an internal studio with massive mini team who assist for example or even Port the game to console and then for mobile we have our internal team within handy games because I'm quite sure you cannot get breakfast on mobile so it's it's really like therefore the publisher can assist you that's one of those questions in the beginning what platform can you cover if sales say sooner or later this title would make sense to be a simultaneous release just keep that in mind that it will take some time to Port the game on the other platforms as well so it should be in the Milestone plan that you are finished with the PC game but we are holding it back for three more months for example or even longer that need to be covered at the end of the day and then again we discussed with the developer if that's okay because a lot of developers they cannot hold up three four six months with their own money some others having not an issue with

that but at the end of the day it really depends my personal opinion yes do cross-platform because you only have one chance to get a lot of eyeballs on day one and yes it sounds good to release only on PC I can tell you on the budget side it means normally release on CN console first mobile later because our mobile games are normally paid around 9.99 up to 20 bucks we we as handycams didn't realize any game that's higher and we are already crazy on the other side there but if you release the same game with the same content for 40 bucks for example on Console it's a difference of 20 bucks how do you explain that to the consumer that's why we release normally the mobile version later on but that's again that's a discussion you should have as a developer with the publisher what makes sense because not everything makes sense in the beginning if we can explain it that yes

great thank you very much unfortunately we're gonna have to end it there thank you very much guys as so many things I'd love to talk about but [Applause] you have an awesome bunch of people I mean I think we've got everybody who wants to be talked to about publishing there is um yeah the question I was going to ask is do they tell developers what the marketing budget is sadly I didn't get a chance to ask that [Music] thank you