Feature: 'Mike Wilson On GameCock's Publishing Party'

After the success and then acquisition of publisher Gathering Of Developers (G.O.D), the flamboyant Mike Wilson is back with Austin-based 'big indie' publisher Gamecock, and in this exclusive interview, Gamasutra finds out what the idiosyncratic company's developer-centric philosophy and artistic drive are all about. Given the company's artist-driven philosphy and radically different approach to more traditional publishing practices, what will happen as GameCock continues to grow? As it turns out, the company has no lofty goal to become bigger, just better. Wilson explains: “We’ll do ten or twelve games at a time, max, and we’re committed to stay this size. God Games was twelve people when we sold it, and we did 100 million dollars in revenue that year. And that’s kind of where we want to be, and we grew after we sold it, too, we were kind of like “okay we’re part of a big company now, we’ll hire some help.” We got up to around 30 people, and that was becoming uncomfortably big for us. We liked to stay lean and really creative and really get behind every project as a team, which means we can’t do that many games.” He later adds: “We have one producer, and we basically work... our idea is to let the professional independent game developers do their thing, and we work with people we respect, and they have budgets and milestones and all that stuff just like any other publisher, we just don’t attach 20 producers to it, which are typically people that have never made a game, trying to tell people like Alex [Seropian], who you just met, how to make his game better. I think that’s absurd. And again, that’s part of the reason we don’t try to own the IP. You get a publisher with too much control and they can’t help themselves, they start to think they made the game.” You can now read the entire interview, which includes more fascinating insight into GameCock, and what those driving this unique organization hope to bring to the gaming industry (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).