Publishing 101: What Game to Build, Why, and Which Publisher is Right for You by John Wright

would impact the metrics which in turn would then as part of the due diligence process would fail anyway so it's very important um and then my advice for you right now is if you can bake some form of meta progression into the game at this stage I know that's adding more complexity to to the game but it's it just shows the potential and and Direction and and Publishers like to see that so if you can do it great it's 4 a.m. and we're ring the dice but T drops made of gold and ice with making those coins R Jack Des World chasing the with the two and a half Gamers the midnight crew talking andame design to bring the inside we're rocking those till the early day the way

[Music] [Music] hello everyone my name is John wri and I'm an independent games consultant specializing in publishing and marketing within mobile games so this is the first part of a 14p part Series where I am going to go through and ask some of the big important questions that you are all dying to know about publishing I think there is some really really good and positive sentiment around publishing in the current market there are still some people that have some concerns and some negative sentiment but publishing in general I think is a very strong strategy and way that developers can superpower their games and utilize you know big companies expertise and all of the other benefits including funding and and whatever else is needed right now so today I'm going

to answer a very simple question which is what is the current state of publishing within mobile games today right now the current state of publishing for mobile is actually in a very good place and you know we saw some really standout successes from the likes of lion U with hexasol and rolic with Twisted tangle there was a lot of screw games a lot of other very interesting sort of block blast esque games that came to Market bus jam and all of this other stuff that really from from a casual and hybrid casual perspective really started defining or for the first time started defining what truly what hybrid casual would be so it was a very interesting year we saw a lot of growth in companies that specialized in this type of publishing and um yeah I think overall it was very positive we saw growth in the area which is great so but to clarify why I think publishing is

growing and it's taking off and why it's so important in today's market I've listed three main points and focuses that I want to talk about today so the first one is talking about the absence of funding right so if we recall you know a couple of years ago there was accessibility to funds was was much higher you know gaming VC's were much were investing much more money than they are today and if you look at the first image in the comment section you'll see the most recent gaming VC funding graph from Convoy and what we can easily see here is a couple of things so the first thing is that it's a fiveyear low in terms of investment into games okay which means that yeah there there is less money around and if there is less money being deployed by VCS that means developers are or do not have the accessibility fund they need to correctly build games

and then launch games so the inaccessibility to to to money makes teams have to focus even more whereas a few years ago like if we look at 2021 there was about 10 billion deployed in 2024 there was less than two billion deployed it was a fifth of the amount of money and if we also look at the stages of the cash deployment it was predominantly early stage and what we look at in terms of early stage is effectively VC's running money to help developers build prototypes MVPs or early State projects that in turn means that there is not enough you know money there for teams to start doing things like marketing influencers UA in general so very simply the funding aspect of things means that developers will need someone who can help them with other parts of getting their game launched and making it a successful

business so again this is not me trash talking VCS this is me saying the VCS are investing in one aspect or one point of the game's Evolution and working with a publisher will allow you to take the game to to Market so yeah that's that's the first point the second point is actually a follow on of the first point which is lean teams need to focus on what they do best so as a developer what I advise people to do right now is stay lean and focus on the core facts of game development so that is have a strong strong founding team you know product engineering and and obviously CEO business type guy and then having the bulk of your focus on engineering and effectively building the best sort of prototype or MVP you possibly can um then you can utilize the publishers very wide range of expertise

and funding for user acquisition and getting the game to Market so yeah third Point again just touched on it briefly but Publishers you know bring an an invaluable expertise in technology so what does that mean so not only is the publisher someone who could effectively spend millions of dollars on user acquisition and handle the growth Loop side of thing so monetization and user acquisition and creating you know positive profit driven games but if you are developing an early stage product and you have you know a core Loop you know an original Mechanic you know that's amazing right that's something unique and that's Innovation and that's what people want to see but taking something from you know the ideation stage to hard launch is something completely different this requires a much wider range of skill set you need product people you need producers you need designers you need artists you need mm you need user

acquisition you need monetization you need a wide wide range of skills and you know one of my favorite quotes is you know it takes a village to raise a baby but it takes an army to build a game and I really believe in that a publisher will again bring so much more additional value with the additional expertise but equally they have some of the best technology in the market has to offer and this technology these third party Partnerships or internally built technology is very expensive and developers generally don't have the accessibility of funds to do such thing so working with a publisher gives you the financial support you need it gives you the marketing support you need again which is additional funds it gives you additional expertise in terms of people and the disciplines that they have and it gives you the accessibility to to um technology that you would never be able to afford without it so that is why I believe right now if you want to maximize your chances as small developer

without having a big you know amount of money behind you from potentially you know big raise from VC that working with a publisher will solve a lot of your problems and ultimately what I want more than anything is to see growth in gaming this year and to do that there has to be a combination of you know developers and Publishers putting more games out and yeah that's that's what I really hope for our industry this year and we're going to talk about another very big subject which is what game to build why and what publisher is right for you so just before we we start I really want to make sure that everyone understands what I mean by uh VC feis and Publishing thesis so a lot of people are not aware of this but you know if you're an amazing studio with an incredible game and you're looking to raise money through a VC a lot of the time if your game is not in line with their strategy I.E their thesis they will not invest

money into the studio why this is because where the fund has raised the money from LPS and such they've done it on the basis of telling these people we are investing in these games these projects these type of companies and that means that even if your game is fantastic if you pick the wrong VC you still won't go after it and it's very similar to publishing and I think a lot of people are not aware of this so I'm going to go into a bit more detail today around this so yeah three points that I think are really important when coming down to what game to build why and which publisher to choose is there's in my opinion there's two you know big big types of strategies and there there's multiple you know smaller strategies but overall the the if we go to the top level there's two main ones so the first one is what I refer to as true Innovation true Innovation is when you come up with something completely new this is you know roadblox or or Minecraft or you know something that is

defining in every way you've never seen it before fortnite when it came out you know these are the big ones so the upside to these are very simple it's if you manage to do it and you crack it it's an entirely new area where if if the market responds well to it you're going to get huge amounts of users you're going to make tons of money right so that is one one part of it the downside however is nearly all of them fail because the Market's not ready for it the market receptions not not you know not there so yeah look you can start with point one you know going after true Innovation but it's very very difficult or the second one which is what I refer to as the plus one strategy so so a plus one strategy effectively is take an existing game and this could be you know I give the example here about a match fre going to match 3D right so this could be you're looking at a lot of

match free games you know they're very dominant in the market and you say to yourself what can I do to change this to bring this into a new light where I can add an element of innovation rather than you know building complete Innovation and you know match 3D hit the market and this was just an evolution of match fre right this is instead of doing you know moving three pieces into a line within a Bard it was adding a 3D element so there were pieces on top of each other not just next to each other so this is this is you know traditionally what a plus one strategy is and the upside is very simple it's it's lower risk it's faster to to validate you've got examples in Market which you can compare to and people often you know adopt it much easier because they it's familiar it's not completely new the downside is obviously the saturation and and you know lots of potentially other ones in the market um so you one you need to be quick and two you need to make the

Innovation enough so it it differentiates from the rest of the pack so two do your market research and I can't you know stress this enough but you you can't build in a vacuum you you have to build something that the market is responding well to you can't just make something up you have to look at the signals and my advice here is to use all the data TOS you can so I use sensor Tower because I have access to it but it's you know is expensive there's other platforms out there like app magic and newu and other um free tools which you can get data please do do it if you don't have premium tools then just scrape the store find what's in the charts find find Trends you know like I said last year there at one point I remember there was seven or eight screw games in the top 100 so you can see them you can find them take your shot innovate and then see what happens and sometimes you can knock the the king off the

castle um and then last Point industry reports there's loads and loads of stuff there stuff out there by apps flyer by invest game all of these companies go and do it third Point find the right publisher finding the right publish is extremely important because you know you could submit one of the best games ever but again if it doesn't align with with their thesis then it could be an instant rejection you need to be aware of that and you need to do research into the Publishers to make sure that that is right for them okay so this is why publishing is a partnership it has to match on both sides right so don't be um downhearted if if you do get rejected first because it does happen and it could be out of your control so so yeah like like said again I give an example here if you're making a $10 million MOBA and you pitch it to a publisher that's doing hybrid casual with a 500K budget then even if it's the best mod in the world it won't get

signed because it doesn't match what they're looking for so you can ask them this like you can reach out to say what is your publishing thesis what is the deal size what is you know what is driving you right now and a couple of uh points I say here that I think would be good is check out their portfolios so look at the App Store under their account see what type of games they're working on and see if your game is in line with what they've done previously that's a really good thing to start Google their names of their exec find their vpf publishing find their CEO find interviews in Pocket Gamer in Tech crunch look at interviews on deconstruct for fun find what they're talking about and how they're positioned in it it's really important and then also guys don't just blanket send pitches and decks it's I I saw hundreds and hundreds of decks over my time at quarle and I would have wished if people would have tailored the decks a bit more then more of them would have probably got through to the green light stage and I'll cover

green light and due diligence in a future podcast but yeah final fault success isn't always about building a great game it's about building the right game for the right reasons and pitching it to the right publisher you can't just do a scatter gun approach you need to be highly strategic picking the right people and then your chances of success go up dramatically and going to answer another big question which is how do publish find and sign new games I think it's really important for the developers out there to understand the processes that the Publishers take to find games because ultimately being discoverable is very important for you if you eventually want to you know work with a publisher signed by a publisher launch a game using the Publishers you know extensive means so the first point I want to go over today is around the people behind the game discovery so who is it whose job is it to actually

find the games so there's two sort of major ways of looking at this so one is there's a BISD team or a sourcing team so essentially these are the same things sourcing is normally what we refer to in PCC his Dev is really what we refer to in Mobile but essentially these are people with task with one job which is going out there and finding new exciting games and by the way it doesn't always have to be early projects either some strategies from certain Publishers will look for games that are nearer completion because that is part of their publishing thesis and I've gone over that quite a lot over the last couple of days so I think hopefully this will start to sink in about strategy around Publishers and what they're looking for um but yeah or the other you know point two is a publishing manager so a publishing manager effectively encompasses not only the business

development parts and finding the game but they also Encompass the uh sort of um developer management of the game so they find the game they sign the game and then they retain the uh developer relationship from a commercial strategy in pointless um perspective this could mean that you know in years to come there would be other games other launches and that person already holds the relationship to be able to utilize that to ensure that those second third fourth projects eventually you know come back to the publisher because we have established a partnership and we're going to talk about Partnerships in publishing between developers and Publishers you know later in the series but it's something that's really really important so how the next part of this is ultimately how do people find the games so you know who's looking for the games now you know the titles you you can find them quite easily by searching LinkedIn and and marrying them up to the different Publishers that that you want to so you know this is how you find the people you need to speak to but how do they actually find the games it's it's a

tough question right each company has slightly different strategy tools ways and all of that but ultimately there's a couple of points here that really highlight the basics so they're looking at the App Store hell of a lot so they're trying to find new game submissions and seeing what's what's looking good by playing them you know through through the store like downloading playing they're analyzing the market so they're using sens Tower app magic Etc to find again new games that look like they've got good uh sort of metrics or whatever metrics they can find from the data platforms they're checking platforms like it so it is great for early stage prototypes and coming out with new Concepts I think it's a bit of an unsung hero in our industry if I'm honest um they use internal systems so taxonomies uh scrapers and you know some people even get day-to-day reports of all new game submitted and again taxonomy so what type of game they are where who's the studio all of that stuff um and then a big one uh and maybe not an obvious one

to some developers because they're not outgoing is attending industry events talks you know uh panels all of this kind of stuff so it's really important to get out there and meet the Publishers so I put together five ways for you to improve your chances of getting signed so the first one again this could be just a little bit of common sense but you'll be surprised at how many people put games out before they're ready is make sure your game is ready to to be played so what I mean by that is it doesn't need huge amount of content one to two hours worth of content is completely acceptable but it needs to be enough content to show the true vision of the the game and then you know the core mechanic and everything else but also make sure it's you've tested it and there's no bugs because if a publisher looks at the game and there's bugs they'll just you know say no this doesn't work or it would impact the metrics which in turn would then as part of the due diligence process would fail anyway so it's very important um and

then my advice for you right now is if you can bake some form of meta progression into the game at this stage I know that's adding more complete um complex complexity to to the game but it's it just shows the potential and and Direction and and Publishers like to see that so if you can do it great uh second Point again I just both spoke about leverage industry events they are a gold mine for you because every publisher will send different people under the guys of we need to sign new games so these people are literally there for one reason only it's a great way to grab their attention the idea of events is not to you know get something signed there and then but is to create a bond relationship a connection with someone in the bisf sing Team Etc and then establish okay next week we'll have followup or the week after we have a followup and and to to Kick the Can you know down that road um again all major Publishers send people it's really important when you can end up meeting 10

15 different Publishers within a couple of days and it can be a massive impact to you to your um potential chances to get signed uh build strong relationship with Publishers so even if the game you have right now does not get signed it doesn't mean that in the future the publisher won't be interested so it's important to establish relationships and cultivate them so if for example a publisher gives you some feedback you know and then you develop the you know um you utilize that in the product and develop that then after you've completed that send them an update with a new build saying hey look we really took on your feedback here's the new project with it applied what do you think and just keep those conversations open because the relationships are very important because equally you want to build advocacy internally because if you have a champion and that person is your champion in the publisher that can sometimes push things through or people take you know a leap of faith on you so really really important understand what Publishers are looking

for and I can't stress this enough over the last couple of days understand the publishing thesis the criteria the deal side the game preferences all of these things will help you get signed better or quicker okay so ask them questions don't let it all just be them asking you and yeah if the game doesn't fit fit their Vision at least you know early and then you can start tailoring your approach to different Publishers where it would be a fit very important um and then last Point again which is I think underrated is handle rejection with resilience so a no isn't all the time about your game or your studio it could be the fact that the publisher has 10 projects in the works right now and doesn't have time or the ability or or or resources to get another project to Market so you know they want to they won't be able to even if they wanted to it could be the deal size it could be the portfolio fit it could be a bunch of different reasons but collect the feedback identify the trends iterate

your project and and work on the next game and then again when you have that next project report back to the publisher and go from there and yeah keep the publisher updated it's really important and final thought publishing is a competitive space but understand how the process works gives you an edge so look stay strategic stay adaptable keep the relationships there continue to work on things and I assure you your likelihood to get signed and work with a publisher will go up dramatically and and learning about the publishing teams themselves and how they find games and their strategies is how they do so so today we're going to talk about two predominant strategies uh one is farming and one is hunting and you may be familiar with these terms because they're very common terms in in a lot of different uh types of companies and and business

development and sales in general but the first one obviously being farming so this is a come to us approach so this is the publisher is is U doing marketing is doing PR is building a platform that allows you to submit games it's establishing automation so that you can test the games and they can get results at Mass this is very much a quantitive approach to publishing and I think you know again the differentiation between farming and hunting is one is quantitive and one is qualitative but we'll go into more of that later so yeah if you if you look at the biggest Publishers in Mobile today Voodoo supersonic quali etc etc you'll see a number of these guys have their own publishing portals or platforms Associated to their website so this means that you know if I wanted to submit my game to Voodoo I go to the website click on publishing and then there's a section that allows me to essentially put a bulk of information a

link to the game and then getting someone at Voodoo to renew it soorry review it and the idea is that you know these submissions get counted up at the end of every day and then depending on the number of B BD people they have internally each one of them will go through 10 20 50 depending on how many you get a month and and then essentially they'll spend x amount of time reviewing each of these games and seeing which ones have the um the right amount of potential and those ones would then be approved to go towards testing and as I explained there there is a lot of Automation in these publishing platforms to dat so a lot of them will allow you to do you know upload creatives and basically go live on Facebook and the publisher will spend $100 $200 testing your game to understand CPI and early stage retention and stuff like that so it's very important to you know understand that this process again is very quantitative there is tons of

applications so you need to stand out and we'll talk about that at the end of the of the video so another very important thing that you need to understand is that from a farming strategy you normally get I would say anywhere between 1 in 300 to one in 500 going to launch so what this means is you know there's less than you know a percent of of games being submitted through the portals that actually go to being signed and launched and it's because the quality of the submissions isn't arguably always quite low so you do get some Diamonds in the Rough and one of the best games I've ever worked on came through a submission and you know if you have it as established by your publishing process then I definitely think it's it's a vital strategy hunting so the difference and and again we covered this off a lot yesterday talking about the BD team and what their role is within that and you know a notably what they are there to do so the hunting strategy is a go to them strategy so this is the BD team

essentially are doing everything that I explained yesterday looking at you know the store Pages looking at LinkedIn using tools internally to to see what games have been submitted and blah blah blah and you know they they're effectively also looking at other Publishers and seeing what other studios are being published by them and trying to talk to these people and it's about building our Rapport on their side right cuz the better Studios they sign the more games that launch then notably their bonuses and stuff like Financial incentives are normally linked to you know success so for the for the BD people and the publishing team it's really important to make sure they're spending their right amount of time on the right people again what you'll notice about them is they'll probably contact you on LinkedIn or email and they'll they'll say hey it would be great to talk about your game and can we jump on a call here's my calendar Le etc etc and again the focus is very much on quantity so quality not quantity so the mix of farming and hunting gives both

qual quantity and quality to the publisher and the BD team and but if I was going to say which one gets the higher priority it's the hunting not the farming because hunting again has a you know a much more targeted approach and the conversion to success is much higher so with with hunting it could be one in 20 or 1 in 50 um compared to one in 300 or one in 500 with farming so really important to understand those two processes and and how you know the BD teams in Publishers work so if I was going to give you free pieces of advice on how you can improve your likelihood to be detected you know be remembered and everything else I would say and again this might be common sense but you'll be surprised how many people don't do it optimize your portal submission make sure you give as much data and as much information about the studio the game the design again any

previous data from tests that you might have done with another publisher or that you've had internally the more information the better because the more information provided the better the BD team can do in terms of making a decision what you don't want to do is not put enough information and just be rejected because there was something vital missing and they have to move quickly on to the next thing so yeah please make sure you do that two proactively connect with the BD team so this can either be at events like what we spoke about yesterday or it can be through Linkedin so go to the LinkedIn page of the publisher find the people in business development publishing management or sourcing you know just drop them one of them an email or again a message on LinkedIn and say hey this is me I submitted my game I really like what you do and just try and you know keep it light and and fresh and friendly but the idea is that you're trying to establish a contact uh a contact into internally you're trying to find that building advocate in there and building

out a rapport is very very important third Point personalize your approach and this is again something that I see time and time again especially when you know for people both hunting and farming actually so so essentially if if someone if you submit your game through the portal make sure that again the submission is tailored to be in line with everything you know about the publisher or if it's someone has approached you and they they contacted you you know as part of a hunting strategy then make sure you tailor any followup or deck with the publisher in mind because if you show that you're giving it the time and attention it deserves you're more likely to eventually you know build out the relationship get signed and also remember it's not always about the game you have now it could be the game in a year or the game in two years or the game five down five games down the line it's about like once you've got that relationship it's very easy to to to you know to go back to that and and the

indry is full of Goodwill so look my final thought is whether the publisher is leveraging farming or hunting strategies it doesn't matter but knowing how they operate can make all of the difference in getting your game noticed thank you and have a good day he