Computer game publishing

In December , Tencent one of the biggest game companies around announced that they and Nintendo would cooperate in selling Nintendo Switch consoles in China. We can assume that this will push the market forward but it is still difficult to predict console market growth in China at present. Nevertheless, we believe that consoles have a promising future in China. Microsoft allows pretty much everyone to create and publish Xbox games. If you are specifically interested in the Chinese market, we recommend E-Home interactive, which belongs to Microsoft and it is the largest publisher on the Chinese Xbox One platform.

Nintendo has its own rules and regulations you have to agree to. After you submit your game, it will take several weeks to go live. During this time, you can start to promote and organize your sales push. To aid with this, first, make sure your game supports Chinese both Traditional and Simplified and your metadata store text is translated into Chinese too.

Then you have a binary choice. Either find a trusted and experienced Chinese publisher who understands Chinese law, gamers, tax, monetization, etc. If you go for option 1, your publisher will help you oversee the launch, distribution and promotion of your game in return for a revenue share.

You should find a publisher who understands and has experience with your game genre. Giant Interactive publishes strategy games.

The relationship between you and your publishers is not a one way street. They will of course help you reach the Chinese market, but your game will also help them. They have goals to achieve - perhaps gain a larger market share, influence, revenue, etc. Right publishing partners that have synergistic goals. Where to find a publishing partner? In the game industry, the best matching platform is ChinaJoy, the largest gaming exhibition held in Asia. There you can meet local publishers and pitch your project to them.

Top Chinese publishers according to App Annie , :. The processing time will take around 6 months. It excludes assets held for rental purposes. This percentage represents all current assets not accounted for in accounts receivable and closing inventory. This percentage represents tangible or intangible property held by businesses for use in the production or supply of goods and services or for rental to others in the regular operations of the business. It excludes those assets intended for sale.

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But the upside of working with premium games is that there is no use after the game has been launched. This can be negative for some people. We also observed special phenomena for the P2P business model game publishing. The indie game developer stated that it just launched the game without any data collection and analysis. Furthermore, it does not keep working on the game for an extended period in order to maintain players after it has been launched. According to previous research, with the emergence of new game value chains, it has become possible for game developers to handle publishing themselves [ 6 ].

Our interview results show that with the emergence of new value chains, some indie game developers have started handling all of the publishing work themselves, including marketing, online activities, and social media promotion.

The value chain changes actually bring new phenomena and the game industry has moved towards a new situation in which indie game developers can conduct self-publishing without sharing the revenue with publishers. Besides this, different from previous research, in which game analytics is used for game development and game research [ 1 ], our interviews show that game analytics has also been used in indie game self-publishing by indie game developers.

However, the interviewees highlight a number of major challenges during their indie game self-publishing. Our results indicate the main challenges for indie game developers in publishing their games. These challenges mainly relate to marketing, data collection, and data analysis. We also found that the performance of game analytics is influenced by the business models used for different games. Regarding marketing promotion, we noted a difference from previous research [ 5 ].

Indie game developers are eager to keep a good relationship with distribution channels such as the App Store or Google Play for the benefit of market promotion. Before launching a game, they will try to contact an editor to get a feature from the distribution channel side. This should be a good way of acquiring new users with no marketing budget. However, distribution channels have their own ideas and promotion standards about featured games.

It is therefore impossible to ensure that each indie game can be featured after launch. Although most of the indie games have limited resources [ 9 ] without a feature, they have to put some budget for the marketing promotion themselves. So reaching potential players with a limited marketing budget is the key to their marketing promotion.

It should be based on ROI analysis during the publishing process, which is emphasized by many indie game developers. Besides this, social media also plays a very important role for indie studios in the promotion of their games. Regarding data collection, we also found that some indie game developers have already tried using data analysis to guide their game self-publishing process.

However, as they lack game publishing experience [ 4 ], most of them are not very clear about what kind of data should be collected. Thus far, they have only focused on basic metrics collection such as retention, revenue, and daily users as a basis for analysis. Besides this, what is most important is that understanding the meaning behind the data is challenging for indie game developers.

Regarding data analytics, most indie game developers in our research use existing data analytics tools to perform basic analysis, such as retention and revenue analysis [ 2 ]. However, they still lack systematic and detailed analysis to identify potential problems hidden behind the data. According to our research, another issue for indie game self-publishing is that many indie game studios have no dedicated analyst. The indie game studios in our interviews have few employees and most of them are focused on game development.

Game analytics work is often handled by their CEO or other staff members as a part-time job. Thus, providing them with easy learning and effective data analysis methods or visualized publishing models is crucial for guiding their game self-publishing. Besides this, game analytics can be used to guide the direction of game development [ 1 ].

According to our interviews, it can also guide the indie game developer early game access. During early access, they will acquire a few players to conduct the testing.

If the retention is not very good, they may stop the game development, abandon the game, and start a new game project. Regarding game analytics tools, most of the studios in this study prefer to use the basic analytics tools provided by distribution channels, for example, iTunes Connect and App analytics. These tools provide the basic functions for game self-publishing analysis, such as impressions, in-app purchases, paying users, and installations. Some of the studios prefer to use third-party analytics tools such as Unity Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and Flurry.

However, most indie game developers cannot provide insight analytics combined with the game itself because they do not know how to convert users into loyal and paying players [ 5 ].

According to our research, it is really hard for indie game developers to find out the solution behind the data. It is also hard for them to make the right decision for game optimization and guide their game publishing process more effectively. Previous literature shows that additional business models that provide various ways of paying for a game experience will allow game companies to capture more consumer value [ 7 ]. According to our research, as far as F2P games are concerned, indie game developers have already tracked some data and conducted a basic analysis.

However, for P2P games, the indie game developers in our research did not track retention and monetization as they only calculated the consumer value by downloads. They do not keep working on the game for a very long time after launched to maintain players and increase consumer value.

As the probability of failure is too high, they abandon the old games and start new projects. So how to help them with the P2P game self-publishing and make success based on game analytics is very valuable. Our research is based on interviews with different indie game studios to identify the potential research gaps for indie game publishing. Although game value chain changes make indie game self-publishing possible, how indie game developers do the game self-publishing business is still unclear.

We conducted a set of interviews with indie game developers to find out the main challenges for indie game publishing. Our interview study shows that with the emergence of new game value chains, indie game developers can handle the publishing business themselves. They have already used BI technologies for game self-publishing, but there are still challenges.

The main challenges include how to conduct market promotion based on ROI data analysis, how to collect useful and valuable game data, and how to analyse these data and guide their game optimization and game self-publishing process. The discovered main themes for our research include marketing challenges, data collection challenges, data analytics challenges, and the role of the business model.

Our study advances research on business intelligence used in the game industry. In fact, BI can not only be used for supporting game development but also can be used for guiding game publishing. In brief, our research expands the application of game analytics in the field of game publishing and digs out the challenges faced by indie game developers during their game self-publishing.

It provides a solid basis for solving these challenges through further research. To date, the interview data that have been collected is from Swedish and Chinese indie game developers only.

Thus, in future research, we plan to include more indie game developers from other countries and regions to further validate our findings. During the interviews, we noted that game analytics were closely related to the game business model. Therefore, identifying better BI solutions for games with different business models, particularly P2P games, requires further research.

Besides this, at present, we did not distinguish between different platforms, such as PC platforms and mobile platforms, during the interviews as many indie game developers are engaged in both PC and mobile game self-publishing.

When diving into the details because of the differences in the game platform itself, indie game self-publishing may turn out to be even more complex.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Article of the Year Award: Outstanding research contributions of , as selected by our Chief Editors. Read the winning articles. Journal overview. Special Issues. Academic Editor: Yiyu Cai.

Received 19 Jul Accepted 26 Dec Published 21 Jan Abstract With the continuous development of the game industry, research in the game field is also deepening.

Introduction Business intelligence BI has been applied to game development for game design and game optimization [ 1 ]. Figure 1. Comparison between different game value chains [ 6 ]. Published its mobile game in the App Store and Google Play itself. Note that the Metascore average the first factor counts slightly more than the other factors. In addition, note that iOS games are not included in the figures below. The Italian game company, which publishes third-party titles for every platform, had a strong thanks to a steady stream of positively reviewed games and few misfires.

Scored products are the number of products released last year with at least four reviews from professional critics which is the minimum needed to have a Metascore calculated ; iOS games are not included.

Average Metascore is the average of all individual Metascores for all scored products in , while the Metascore distribution chart shows what percentage of those Metascores were green Metascore of , yellow or red To qualify as Great which earns the publisher 5 bonus points , a game must have a Metascore of at least 90 and have at least 7 critic reviews.

It was the second straight strong year for the publicly traded gaming giant. After ranking first in our "mid-sized" category a year ago and the incongruity of having some of the industry's biggest companies labeled "mid-size publishers" is one reason we eliminated that distinction this year , Activision managed to increase its average Metascore by over two points, thanks to critically acclaimed releases like FromSoftware's Souls -like action-adventure title Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Of the publisher's four releases that didn't receive positive reviews, two came from its Blizzard subsidiary: a Switch port of Overwatch and a Hearthstone expansion. Nintendo boosted its average Metascore by nearly four points compared to last year's mark despite being one of the company's rare years without any releases scoring 90 or higher. In recent years, the Swedish strategy and management game specialist has ranked highly in our annual publisher lists, and was another strong year that saw Paradox's average Metascore increase by nearly 3 points.

As always, Paradox's releases included numerous expansions to previously released games, but its best title was a new game: the 4X sci-fi title Age of Wonders: Planetfall. Many of Capcom's worst-reviewed titles were Switch ports of previously released games such as Devil May Cry 2 and Resident Evil 6. The three-year-old spinoff from arthouse film studio Annapurna Pictures specializes in indie games—and good ones.

No publisher had a higher average Metascore in than Annapurna, with most of its releases scoring in the 80s including Outer Wilds and Telling Lies. Microsoft's performance is similar to that of its slate, with an average Metascore that is just 0. Renamed a year ago, Xbox Game Studios released only sequels and ports in , ranging from very good the Switch version of Ori and the Blind Forest to disappointingly by-the-numbers Crackdown 3.

In addition to serving as an online games storefront, Humble has also operated its own publishing business for the past few years, handling distribution for a handful of titles from indie game studios. This is the first time Humble has qualified for our publisher rankings, and it's an auspicious start. As it has in many recent years, Square Enix released more products in than any other publisher—and it's not even close. And Square Enix also released one of the biggest duds of , Left Alive.

The Texas-based publisher posted an average Metascore in the green range for the third consecutive year thanks to acclaimed releases like a new Switch version of Downwell , GORN , and Ape Out.