Creator of Day Z has turned down publishers before
By Jess Colwill on August 17, 2012 at 4:13 pm
The world rejoiced when it heard that ArmA II mod Day Z was being developed as a standalone game. But apparently, Dean Hall, creator of Day Z has been approached by publishers before, saying they wanted to release the game to the masses – and he has turned them away. “Many, many publishers have contacted me about DayZ but I always ended up repeating the same question: what benefit are you providing development?” he told MCV. “What value is actually being added to the process by publishers, when you can distribute for free?”
Source: MCV
Hands-on with the new standalone DayZ: A promising overhaul
Even Bohemia's clunky alpha looks better than some zombie clones.
In-game radios and walkie-talkies planned for DayZ standlone
Dean 'Rocket' Hall updates from the base camp at Mt. Everest.
Rocket: “DayZ is a big ‘f#@% you’ to everyone who said modding wasn’t important”
Rocket pulls no punches.
You can use the following bbCode
[i], [b], [img], [quote], [url href="http://www.google.com/"]Google[/url]
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
facebook
twitter
google+
rss
I always wondered this myself. For a start-up with no public awareness you gain their(Publishers) well oiled publicity machine, but for an already popular mod its not really needed.
Very valid comment from him, it frees the devs up from publisher expectations, keeps overheads down and more.
This, I like this.
Publishers often loan money to the dev’s, so they can develop faster – This is the main reason publishers boss dev’s around, because they have their own money on the line which they lose if the dev goes broke.
You can bet that these publishers who contacted him were all offering to loan money, and he didnt like the terms.
If all the publishers were doing was publishing, they would just yay/nay the final product before advertising – they wouldnt care what devs did during development.
The ‘problem’ we all have with publishers, that they interfere in creative works, all stems from the fact that theyre loaning money – the fact that they also publish the final work is really separable from the issue. If they got the money from a bank, or floating shares, those sources would ‘interfere’ in the exact same way.
The only way to be free of that is to pay for development costs yourself.
Even kickstarter has implied restrictions based on what fans expect, and though it isnt enforceable so seems unrestricted at the moment, the kickstarter bubble is going to burst as soon as someone doesnt live up to those implied restrictions – so it really isnt much different to any other form of external funding.
With a few difference there though…
with kickstarter if it goes through then there are enough ppl who agree with the goal/expectation to fund it essentially.
with publishers, you have to convince the publishers exec themselves first who are not representative of what the customer base or public may or may not agree with.
In the publisher model, it is entirely possible and likely that a game design that will pay for itself in development cost plus profit will still be rejected if the publisher think there is a better path to use their asset.
In the kickstarter model, the dev still have to convince ppl to sell their idea but instead of just a few execs, they have to convince a public instead, however with this model… they do not need to convince all of the ppl who listen, they don’t even need to convince MOST ppl who listen, they just need to convince ENOUGH ppl to fund it.
So ultimately with kickstarter, the crowd’s preference is the one that decides whether it goes through or not. (ie: funded, not whether it lives up to expectation), it may not be necessarily going to give blockbuster return when it is sold… it may not even have that many ppl backing it (niche genre for example) but as long as enough are willing to fork out for it then it will go through.
Whereas with publishers, what goes funded is the publisher’s preference based on their condition and plan. If 75% of their target audience like plan A and 25% like plan B, publishers will always pick plan A given the choice even if plan B is still going to be profitable and even if that 25% still amounted to a million customer since plan A is still more profitable.
But with kickstarter, that plan B HAS A CHANCE as long as enough ppl in that 25% are willing to support it.
This is the whole point of kickstarter… projects which normally will have next to no hope of going through with publishers like the situation above, now has a CHANCE to go through if they can get enough ppl to support it.
Dean Hall is smart enough to avoid the mistake many devs (especially aussie devs) have learnt the hard way. Not mentioning any names OH WAIT EA comes to mind.
I think developers keeping as much of their game within their own control is a good thing. Publishers provide money and they want results and I imagine that there are complicated legal contracts drawn up about when returns are expected.
Of course it can go too much the other way as well with developers sinking all into a concept they keep changing ala 3d Realms and DNF – they almost had a finished game a few times over and then they redeveloped from scratch – too concerned with being the biggest and best (and ironically it seems if they released those games when they were going to, they would of been).
I always believed that the primary reason why Blizzard is such a dominant game developers is that they have always had full control over their products and their release schedules. Blizzard has in fact never self published a game but rather always had someone do that for them but blizzard is also known for polish and staying true to a concept beyond just about any game developer.
Of course Blizzard is Blizzard and not many publishers would agree to the terms they set especially to small no name developer but I still believe that these are the conditions that create great games, so kudos to Rocket for understand this.
Minecraft is another title that comes to mind, more then 10 million games sold without a single bit of marketing or advertising done.
Actually something I have been saying for a few years now. Advertisement is a great way to sell a bad game, a great game sells itself.
If you think Blizzard have full control over their products anymore you have got to be kidding yourself.
There’s tons of examples to the contrary.
No-one? Nobody is going to mention the amazing screen cap up there?
Perhaps it’s for the best.