Beldaran wrote:How are things back in the 90's?
Pretty awesome actually. I never bought the stupid game because I was busy playing other things but now I wish I'd bought it back when it was newer.
Vagla I'm thinking that publishing video games is probably similar to publishing books, only with the owner of the console as a gatekeeper. If you want a game to be sold in retail stores (and possibly be played without modding), you have to get it licensed by the console maker. Particularly when the console is sold at a loss (PS3, XBox 360), the console maker has to recoup their losses via licensing fees, overcharging for memory cards, and slowly increasing the size of hard drive peripherals. It's going to hurt the wallet to go through this process.
If you go through a publisher, I'm sure they'll be all rainbows and unicorns before they get your signature on a contract, but keep in mind that they have to pay Nintendo and at the same time pay for their own employees, so you'll be giving them a big cut of the money and they'll be giving Nintendo a cut of that.
If it's like book publishing, then a publisher probably sucks; I read a blog article detailing the process and I'll try and find it again so I can link it for sources, but I know that Charles Petzold (a legendary Windows programming author) has gotten so fed up with it he's sworn to never write another programming book again unless it's just for fun. A paraphrase of the article I read (which was titled something like "10 things I wish I knew about book publishing before I wrote a book"😉 goes like this: you pay the publisher to put their name on the book, then you get to call retailers and convince them to buy your book. If you're lucky, they'll believe in the book and put it on prominent shelf space and advertise it. If not, they'll spine it on the top shelf in a rarely-visited corner of your section. You don't get paid for some period agreed to in your contract because if they don't sell it, the book store will send your book back to the publisher for credit. Your final cut comes maybe a year later; by this time the bookstore has their cut, the distributor has their cut, the publisher has their cut, and you get what's left over. I hear rumors that for a $30 book (not uncommon for programming books; indeed they tend to run $40-$50) the author sees maybe $1-$3 per purchase.
I'd imagine video game publishing is similar, though the concept of "prominent shelf space" is kind of moot in WiiWare since new games get pretty equal treatment. If you're going to have to promote the product yourself, why let some big guy get a cut of your profits?
The book analogy does fall apart because plenty of people self-publish; this reduces the fat cats that get a cut and if you're in with your demographic the advertising is pretty much done for you. (A good example is why the lucky stiff's Nobody Knows Shoes about the Shoes UI library for Ruby; I knew about this when it was a day old because why is quite famous in the Ruby crowd and wrote the excellent Poignant Guide to Ruby.) I suppose the only analogy to self-publishing when it comes to video games is to write your games for the PC: so far it doesn't look like any of the consoles are friendly to the low-budget homebrew crowd. At least you can download the XBox 360 SDK and use it for free/cheap.
I'm just kind of killing time about a topic of which I only have anecdotal knowledge though.