What could game publishers be doing better? 2

(Lack of) prototype funding came up a LOT. Justin Berenbaum of Xsolla summed it up: “Agreed that seed/prototype funding is probably the hardest part. So many devs take this risk… if you’re a dev that can’t afford to, it puts you at a disadvantage.” Didn’t see a clear consensus on a fix - though to my knowledge, a small minority of publishers have done prototype funding from time to time.

I’ve heard this one a lot, and Izzy Gramp notes it: “talking to devs and having that limbo period [when it’s unclear if the publisher will sign the game]… what I love is publishers who tell you how long the process takes.” I suspect that the supply of devs is very high, and a lot of publishers are juggling lots of possible projects. But improvement is needed. Related point from Forrest Dowling: “I'd love more fast ‘no’ answers, with clear reasons why. I don't need a detailed analysis, but even just "nah, too expensive. Also the demo wasn't super fun" or similar.”

A perception of publishers not being open to signing games from all geographies, cultures, and languages: “Not being biased towards developers from [developing world] countries. Not to say I've met some personally but I've had friends ghosted just because English wasn't their native language.”

One interesting angle noted by Martin Greip of Eat Sleep Play: “Some pub[lishers] feel it's weird with studios having investors and economic partners… Normalise that, we gotta get to alpha somehow.” It’s true that many game publishers don’t want - or even know - how to deal with entities who invested before the publishing deal is signed. But it seems like there should be variant deal structures for this.

ICO’s Thomas Bidaux has helpfully charted the fact that almost 200 games launched on Nintendo Switch in October, up 17% year on year (see above). And the last week of October on its own had 50 Switch games debut. So there’s definitely a creeping increase going on here, yipes.

Chris Zukowski continues to rock it with excellent analysis articles, getting deeper into visual aspects of marketing than I dare to tread. His latest is about trends in Steam image capsule design, and makes a good point: “I don’t think you should make your capsule so unique that nobody has seen anything like it. Instead, you must be in dialog with the best selling game in your genre, because chances are the people who buy your game also bought that game.”

There are more PlayStation 5 interviews and articles coming out concentrating on its tech. I thought this Mark Cerny-focused hardware overview in the Washington Post was particularly interesting. The innovation focus for Sony, as echoed by Jim Ryan, are the SSD, haptics in the controller and 3D audio, though the WaPo writer concludes that some of the PS4 sizzle didn’t translate: “A lot of these ideas [in launch tech presentations] didn’t really catch on.” These features look great, but I quibble with the idea of hardware as chief differentiator. We’ll see?

To underscore the move towards video game spending happening during COVID quarantine, I was pointed to this recent RoosterMoney survey around kids’ pocket money. The little tykes apparently get $8.91 to spend per week on average, and earlier this year, 3 of the top 5 spending areas were specific games (Roblox, then Fortnite, then Minecraft.) Interesting.

Steam has officially rolled out its Steam Playtest feature (previously in beta), which, as Gamasutra says, “allows developers to run playtests directly through the platform without needing to juggle external participant lists or game keys.” There’s more info over in Steamworks documentation, but it seems very useful: “…a free, low-risk way to get playtesting data for their game without stressing out about Steam keys, user reviews, or wishlists… by using a separate “child” appID.”

Microlinks: Lars Doucet still rolling out innovative deep analysis on GameDataCrunch, this time overlapping audience including Steam genre tags; Twitch-tracking don SullyGnome showed the long-term post-COVID ‘hours watched’ increase in a handy graph; for anyone looking for a FUN video game console to develop for, the Playdate is getting close to done.