Secrets of the Game Business (Game Development Series)

Game publishing is an enormous business. North American game sales, which have outpaced the motion picture box office for several years, are expected to top $10 billion per year by the time this book goes to print. In fact, games are just about the only high-technology industry that not only survived the stock market debacle of 2001 to 2002 unscathed, but actually experienced sustained growth in the process.

While the game industry is much larger and far more diverse than the consumer magazines would lead us to believe—in the past two years alone, this author has worked on board games, webisodics, comedy broadcast on cell phones, crossover projects involving multi-billion dollar corporations from other fields, and even interactive edutainment for museums—its canonical business model remains the developer-publisher-retailer continuum. This first section of the book explores the inner workings of each of its components and discusses such issues as the consequences of the ever-increasing cost of game development; concentration of the publishing world as a result of the high risks of game marketing; how developers can make the most of their relationships with publishers; the power wielded by retailers; who makes money from games, how, and when; and how a publishing company takes a game to market.

The articles in this section explore these issues from the (at times contradictory) points of view of developers and publishers:

• Mason McCuskey, president of independent development company Spin Studios, explains the mistaken assumptions that mine the relationships between some developers and their publishers.

• Kathy Schoback, director of developer relations at Sega of America, discusses the roles of all of the entities involved in game publishing, including little-known contributors such as testing studios and regional distributors.

• In a pair of articles, Fran ois Dominic Laram e, freelance game development consultant, discusses the inner workings of the retail market for games, how successful developers can earn profits in this environment, and how publishers bring games to market.

• Senior producer Mitzi McGilvray explains how developers can establish harmonious relationships with the producers assigned to their projects by the publisher.

• And finally, Philippe Larrue, Mary O'Sullivan, and William Lazonick, a team of researchers at INSEAD, Europe's premier graduate business school, explore the winning strategies of some of the world's most successful publishers.