Publishing, Partnership & Problems

[Music] [Music] next we have our second digital uh uh event victoria victoria bereaver from quantum will be giving her talk publishing partnerships and problems i'm such a bit late so um kind of skip the boring stuff um like okay my name my name um yeah it doesn't matter yeah some some experience company blah blah blah yes so about the um publishing and problems so the point is that when i was starting to prepare the lecture i had like a slightly different image in my head whatever talking what i will want to talk about and i've started a small research and i found that um the articles about

publishing from publishers look like we want to build trust openness come to us everything will be just so fine and then you read articles from developers so like publishers are like teachers greedy and everything and i thought that there might be a problem of misunderstanding and i think that the reason of the problem is that we publishers we really want games on our accounts so bad that we really make it look like the cooperation is very easy it's um colorful bright and it's like a fairy tale pony ride into a um fairy tale country and everything will be great and we do miss imported nuances we do miss important stuff regarding cooperation that can lead to like major consequences and major misunderstanding so uh yeah that's the reason kind of just explained it so yeah what's the real cooperation um the rule cooperation is based on the numbers that don't really show um anything it's based on incomplete and imperfect information it's based on like

cultural barriers sometimes a huge misunderstanding uh miscalculations over estimates and it is like true for every single partnership deal because we don't live in a fairytale world we live in the real world and there are mistakes people are people and well so on and so forth so yeah talking about the problems that every developer will um face uh when talking to a publisher so the first one is the the first impression is that the first talk like publisher developer is rarely the one that contains a lot of useful information it's just a series of simple questions like what engine is your game and build on what uh and what stage of development it is like mvp prototype etc so you just like follow the um the list of questions and after 30 minutes it's like okay let's do a test and that's it but you kind of miss um we miss yeah both of us can miss what drives the company what they want to do like after this game so do they want to build a sustainable business do they

want to just i don't know make this game and forget about game development or they didn't really want to go to publishers but somebody just told them to because the game looks kind of nice so you you miss what drives them and that may be really really important when it comes to making a decision whether to work at this company or not and so the first one is the imperfect communication um sometimes people kind of like um miss and don't understand how to say exactly what drives them and just add their cultural differences accents and sometimes we just really don't understand how to communicate the important things and um we have like a 30 minute conversation and after this 30 minute conversation we may end up thinking like different uh different things like publisher things he asked one questions and received the answer and the developer thinks that he said some something different and we

like live in the two parallel worlds without knowing that we don't understand each other and yeah naive optimism so nobody thinks leaving the house that they will be just i don't know um crashed by a car and they will die going to work no everybody thinks that everything will be okay and that's the same for uh cooperation nobody talks about the worst case scenarios we always talk about the best case scenario so our marketing will be great our cpi's will be super low the game will be cool you will be like developing all the features on time and everything will be just great and that's the this scenario what we usually talk about and when it comes to real cooperation there are like problems they you know the future doesn't work the kpis are not that good and it's not like um i don't know it's like it's not a great problem but um in comparison to what was told um it seems like you were um i don't know you were like if you feel like you were a mischief like somebody told you like

lies or anything but it's not that it's just we both want to believe in the best case scenario and that's just like human thing so yeah some a little bit of recommendations um so for the first thing um for incomplete information better prepare and uh publishers in bds uh from the publishing site they usually do prepare because it's kind of their job but um i lots of times when i was talking to developers i see that they don't really they didn't really prepare they didn't really look for the publisher's account what games they have so why for example this game doesn't receive a lot of ua what's what's bad why you failed to um promote this game as good as you say you would um i don't know what games are you looking for how many people there in your company et cetera et cetera so the more questions you prepare on your site the more information you'll receive about the company and who's really working in there what people are you going to work with um the for the second stuff for perfect

information ask again i see a lot of people they are like shy afraid to ask twice or fries because they don't want to look stupid but it's better to ask and look stupid rather than find yourself in a conversation where you just slightly lose track of what's going on and for the third one i'm sorry but there is no cue for optimism just know that we are always considering things to go in the best way and not the worst yeah and we go to the testing stage after we have had our first meeting we want to test the game because figures they can show us what the game is really worth well um not really because the fir the small tests the first small tests they are very informative they don't really show anything and there is no point of doing the large tests on the beginning because you don't know maybe the game's tpi's are really that bad so you just expand i don't know 300 and everything is um obvious um

so let me tell you like two cases that we had in our practice the first one we tested the game the kpis were like really amazing and we thought that's great we found a hit so we signed an agreement and we went into like marketing ua large scale and we realized that we overestimated the game and on the large scale the kpis were just going down down down and the cooperation didn't really went well for both of us uh the second case we tested the game the kpis were just amazing we were like okay now we are saving we know we had a case so we won't rush into the deal we will just take it slow and we will test the game again after some reworks and while we were preparing like recommendations and feedback developer received um publish an offer from another company and they kinda accepted it and we were like okay so what should we do um i have no answer here i mean um you can um you can test the game and the the keypads can be great but turns out

that they are they're bad and you can test that's the game the kpis turns bad but i don't know somehow they they're great because that's your marketing sucks and um there is nothing you can do about that but um what i can uh suggest is doing as many tests with different publishers as possible if you have a time to wait for a huge test to develop the game a little bit further to let publisher test it more it's it's good but sometimes lots of times developers they find themselves in um um don't have much time for that because of financial issues they want the development funding something like that so they are like trying to uh find the publisher as soon as possible and in this case just try to do as many as many small tests with as many publishers possible and share the results we had lots of cases when our tests showed worse results than the tests of some other publishers so we like re did it again or we just neglected our results

and took the results of the other publisher as they were as if they were true and yeah in this world of incomplete information as much information as you can get is great and just share it between all the other publishers and the problem is that yeah there's recommendations the problem is that some companies they still they have restrictions so they don't let you do tests simultaneously or just one after another or don't even share results and if if you find yourself in a situation like that so the publisher just refuses to tell you the results so just ask please ask them because it's really important and if you receive like bad results if the kpis are bad and you don't want to like show them to you another publisher because you think that they will just do another test maybe the results will be better well um you might do that and i won't judge you but um it's better to tell that the results like to show the results say okay i have this game the kpis are not as good as i

wanted and maybe not good enough to have a publishing offer but publisher may um present you with recommendations ahead so you will just do some amendments to your game and after that we will do another test or they can just tell you right today that maybe you just have to stop working on this game and make another one like in cod development or something like that because if you hide the results you may just lose your own time you can you could be spending on prototyping yet the other game yeah so um right now we find ourselves in a situation where a publisher and developer had like a little bit of communication um you had your game tested the numbers like showed something maybe they didn't show anything at all and developer has like different offers from different publishers but you have a game of a certain genre of certain mechanic art style and more likely the offers that you will receive they will be very similar one

one to another and um they'll like this will be profit share you a budget and operation of the budget help with live ops etc etc so they like kind of all the same so how to decide if the offers are the same and to my um experience developers tend to uh tend to understand if they like if there is a personal affection to the person they're talking to to the publisher they're talking to and the problem is that um you're probably talking to business development manager who is kind of trained to be likable to be nice to say right things at the right time and so if you feel like a personal affection to the person and say yeah we understand each other just remember that you won't be working that this nice likable person i'm not saying that all business development managers are like filthy manipulators no but it's just that you won't be working with a business development manager you will be working with a producer so request the meeting like one hour two hour three hour meeting as long as uh publisher can

provide you with the producer the game designers to understand what people are they what they are thinking about your game what what what they tell you if you have a connection between you and the person you will be working to and just put the business development manager with all his nice smiles a little bit aside and yeah kind of the same goes for publisher's side because sometimes you can talk with a very nice and likable ceo but the technical team afterwards appears to be much slower and the game designer he just refuses to compromise on product plans or anything so it kind of works both sides and the second one um shared vision so developers they really want to understand that they um they and publisher they have the shared vision and they both think in the same direction that the game will go and um yeah you can have like a session where you talk to producer about what you want to do with the game about how it will be developed like further but the problem is that um well you remember the optivism right and uh so here it

comes again because you were talking about the vision and how you will be developing the game in all the bright colors but rarely developer and publisher talks about what if these feature that we have planned what if they just don't work what if the result is worse what we do in this case so should we like just go in the same direction will we redesign this feature like over and over again until it finally comes out will we just stop so what's what's going what will be um the outcome and uh yeah sometimes it's also really good to talk about the the worst cases like what if the um you know if after three months the game just doesn't like make enough money or after six months the game doesn't make enough money so what what shall we do and um talk about all the possible outcomes and not just about how the the game will be developed in the non real world yeah and um so you finally made your decision and we come to uh real cooperation so

what's the first thing you will be faced is the routine so after you have all these great talks about visions and the land of um great features you come to the point where the first three six months you are you will be doing real routine work it's um as here's a lot about monetization a lot about integrating some sdks updating adapters um balancing balancing all over again sometimes it's dragging the offer icon over the mobile phone just to find the best conversion and um it's all this all this work is necessary it's been um proven it's been like statistically proven that this works but it is routine and once if you like yes just yesterday you had a talk about like lots of features of a producer and tomorrow he comes to you with the list of like routine tasks it feels like okay so why aren't we doing what we have planned but it is important and just know that at first you have to

like really prepare the game for next features you have to work on first-time user experience until it is like really polished to a hundred percent and you have to work on all these like small stuff tweaks here to mix here which are not really interesting but are really really important next problem is yeah mistakes so developer comes to publisher because the publisher has expertise and yeah well we do that but sometimes the decision that worked like 100 times doesn't work on 101st just because the market has changed and the games that even fall into the same niche they are different and sometimes you just think that we're proving they don't work and sometimes you just can't rely on the proven answers and you have to experiment and in this case the risk is much higher and so just be prepared we are people we make mistakes publisher can make mistakes developer can make mistakes we had

a situation where um our qa missed the bug that kind of like developer made the bug our qa missed it and we had a build with um live on store if you're running ua on a large scale and the off the the button like purchase for the offer just didn't work and we lost like like tons of money and uh well nobody's um it's like our boss failure we both made mistakes and just be like prepared for that because publishers they also do mistakes we can't just people um yeah and the next step so um when you're signing a deal with publisher you're not signing a deal with just this company you're signing a deal with all of these services and partners and we had cases where our developers fund mistakes and localization provided by our partners and their partners but better the point is that um publishers they have the ability to test a lot of companies to

test simultaneously different localization companies to i don't know run a test to see which localization is better to um to change the uh you know game testing service or etc etc and even if you also have resources for that and you want to do it it's better that you are focused on development and yeah just kind of also bear that in mind that you are receiving the the publisher and all of your services and partners together and they will have an influence over your game actually so what where did it go and yeah the one of the most important things is that when you are working with the developer it's um developer is an entrepreneur he has his game is his company and he has a mind of entrepreneur he thinks in terms of i have a studio i have employees i have to pay them salaries i have to um

you know i have to build a business and you are working with a manager who has work-life balance and um several weeks of paid vacation and your game is maybe not the only one he's working with and sometimes these um different states of minds they can feel like um like i don't know like person doesn't like you personally like for example the developer is irritated that the um producer doesn't respond like very quickly to his um like emails or to his messages and uh but the producer he has like three or four other products he's working there and he just like can't do it and the um and the producer also can be irritated that the developers just spend like the weekends design in the future instead of rebalancing some stuff so um yeah i kind of uh don't really know how how to fix that it's just um just be like a little bit more tolerable

to each other and maybe spend a little time to understand the person understand what drives him i mean sometimes you can really end up with a really like bad game manager who is um i don't know thinking who's coming to work and only thinking how he will leave it in eight hours and go home and do some nice stuff he wants he wants to do but sometimes there is also a person who is passionately driven about games but is just doesn't um perceive your game the way you perceive it um just try to find some time to understand the person behind the the screen uh yeah and priorities um sometimes developers are like afraid of the word prioritization uh because to them it feels like uh there is the number one priority the game where all the resources and all the money um spent and if your game does is not like in the first one or second place or third place it means that nobody will really care

about that actually no so it all comes down to the simple question does the game bring like x amount of revenue if it does you will be 100 um have a dedicated time have dedicated like producer for in time for calls for etc etc if the game doesn't bring x value well yeah then there is a question but the point is don't be afraid to ask so what is like the minimum amount that the game should bring so that it will be interested what if the game doesn't bring this amount so what will you do will you just like forget about us and don't answer our calls uh will you spend i don't know some marketing or some ua on our game even if it doesn't bring x money to you but it will help our studio to stay afloat these are the questions that are very important to ask don't be afraid to ask them and yeah just go through all the possible cases to understand uh what will await you and your studio in your future because i've seen cases when the companies were just um

after some time that well they were like promised a brighter future and when the game just didn't perform that well as publisher wanted they just didn't spend much of ua on the game and the developers they had no money from the revenue share and they were just forced to go on the market and work for pay to prototype because there is there is no other no other way for them yeah and um here we come to results of the cooperation so they're basically like two results the success and the failure in terms of success what's important to understand is that successes rarely um can be like contributed to one party or another uh well basically um if if if your game like succeeded on this publisher with this publisher it doesn't mean that the publisher has done actually a great job probably the game is just really cool and would be like really um and would have the same success on the other publishers account like for example we had a case with the

game like idolized city and idle level clicker and we were not the first publisher who tried to launch this game so we really know that we have made a difference but there are games that were first launched on our accounts and i'm not sure that uh if it was like not us but other publisher they would do like a board's job maybe even better so who knows and um to my mind if you had like a major success with a publisher and you want to stay you want to stick to them because you think that uh one success should be followed by another that's um our own image um and if you want to stay with the publisher just stick because you like the processes you like the people and you like the approach but one success doesn't mean that you have done everything right and that the second time everything will also be right and you'll succeed again and actually this same comes to failure because if the game has failed the publisher it doesn't mean that he made something wrong he made like really tried everything he could uh the

producer might be like really great and he had like brilliant ideas and your development team really did like everything they like the best day possible yeah okay so um the uh um yeah sorry what i wanted to say is that yeah even if you failed if a publisher doesn't mean that you will fail again the same as success so just if you and uh you can stick to this this um partner if you feel like you really understand each other and uh you like the also the approach and the process so yeah the conclusion is um let's talk more about the problems that can arise so we will just destroy these pink glasses over the cooperation and understand that we um and well i think that's the way to build like trust and openness in terms of talking that we can make mistakes we can um i don't know we can fail in communication and understanding and that's the way that they can build really strong partnership

and just not just talking about all the good cases and stuff yeah thank you that's it [Music] [Music] you