So you’ve decided you want to work with a publisher. A good publisher can play a critical role in helping you navigate the vast universe and ensure commercial success, while allowing you to stay focused on what you care about most: making the best game possible. This is where a publisher’s expertise and valuable network comes in to play. The console market, soon, will follow suit.ĭue to this increasing market saturation, most AAA games, let alone indie games, are having a difficult time getting noticed.
The PC market has become so saturated that Steam is beginning to look like a mobile app store. According to Polygon, the number of games on Steam nearly doubled annually from 2014 to 2017, and while 6,000 of them had been released in 2018 at the time of the article’s writing, most of them had sold fewer than 500 copies ( source ). Now zoom back in for a moment and let’s focus on the games industry. It’s not just games competing for attention, it’s literally every other product, service, or cat picture in the universe. Zoom out beyond your galaxy to the larger universe, and the picture starts to become even more daunting.
E ach of these stars has its own gravity, and they’re all pulling for people’s attention – not to mention black holes like AAA titles that will suck the life out of anything nearby. What you might not realize is that when you travel outside of your solar system and view the larger galaxy that surrounds it, your star is just one of countless others.
Sure, there might be other stars in your view, but you pay them little concern, and your game remains the center of your solar system. To you, i t’s the bright shining star in a vast universe. If you’re reading this, you probably have a game that you’re working on that you really care about.