After publishing my game, Pinbot, on Steam and Epic Games, I was approached by many people—mostly in private chats—curious to know what one should expect from such an experience. The questions varied widely. Some, for instance, were concerned with legal matters. Naturally, having some basic knowledge about how to proceed when forming a partnership with an online store or a traditional publisher is helpful when things get serious. I should note that I’m neither an accountant nor a lawyer, but I’m as curious as a monkey, and among the roughly 50 books I read each year, I’ve found a few that cover copyright law and the basics of business. In fact, I also have prior publishing experience in an entirely different field, literature, which isn’t so different from the video game industry.
Others, however—and more wisely, I might add—were much more concerned with what comes next: that thing called marketing, involving social media posts, YouTube videos, and reviews by famous bloggers. How should one approach it?
Let me make one thing clear: I’m not here to hand out any sugarcoating. To be honest, once we move past the purely legal topics, you’ll probably start to sense a growing pessimism. But I want to clarify right from the start that my real intent is to be as straightforward and realistic as possible, even at the risk of sounding harsh. Often, publishing a game—with all that true “publishing” entails, including marketing to foster growth—seems simple only from a distance. Yet, as soon as you take your first steps, you realize the challenges you’ll have to handle, sometimes with a lot of effort and little reward.
I don’t follow many online communities, preferring quality over quantity. But I’ve noticed a general sense of optimism among game creators. In part, that’s a good thing; if you start out convinced you’ll never finish, you’ll likely give up at the first hurdle. But it’s also worth saying that, as the old story goes, if the optimist is excited by the light at the end of the tunnel and the pessimist only notices the darkness, the realist is the one who steps aside to avoid being hit by the oncoming train.
On this journey, I’m inviting you to join a slightly twisted game: you’ll search for information on this thing called publishing, while I’ll do everything I can to dissuade you. Of course, it’s a game I hope to lose…
Top image by Brayear Rodriguez from Pixabay