A video game publisher is a company that publishes Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books and periodicals, as well as websites, blogs, video games and the like video games A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. The word video in video game traditionally referred to a raster display device. However, with the popular use of the term "video game", it now implies any type of display device. The electronic systems used to that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.
As with book publishers Traditionally, the term refers to the distribution of printed works such as books and newspapers. With the advent of digital information systems and the Internet, the scope of publishing has expanded to include electronic resources, such as the electronic versions of books and periodicals, as well as websites, blogs, video games and the like or publishers of DVD DVD, also known as "Digital Versatile Disc" is an optical disc storage media format. Its main uses are video and data storage. DVDs are of the same dimensions as compact discs but store more than six times as much data movies, video game publishers are responsible for their product's manufacturing Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labor to make things for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished goods may be used for manufacturing and marketing Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in, including market research Market research was an offshoot of the advertising boom of the 1950s in the USA. Advertisers began to realise the significance of demographics revealed by Radio and television sponsorship, and to seek more direct feedback about their markets and all aspects of advertising Advertising is a form of communication that typically attempts to persuade potential customers to purchase or to consume more of a particular brand of product or service. Modern advertising developed with the rise of mass production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They usually finance the development, sometimes by paying a video game developer A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers (the publisher calls this external development) and sometimes by paying an internal staff of developers called a studio. The large video game publishers also distribute Distribution is one of the four elements of marketing mix. An organization or set of organizations (go-betweens) involved in the process of making a product or service available for use or consumption by a consumer or business user the games they publish, while some smaller publishers instead hire distribution companies (or larger video game publishers) to distribute the games they publish. Other functions usually performed by the publisher include deciding on and paying for any license The verb license or grant license means to give permission. The noun license refers to that permission as well as to the document memorializing that permission. License may be granted by a party ("licensor") to another party ("licensee") as an element of an agreement between those parties. A shorthand definition of a license is that the game may utilize; paying for localization In computing, internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting; layout, printing, and possibly the writing of the user manual; and the creation of graphic design elements such as the box design. Large publishers may also attempt to boost efficiency across all internal and external development teams by providing services such as sound design Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media and code packages for commonly needed functionality.
Because the publisher usually finances development, it usually tries to manage development risk with a staff of producers The earliest documented use of the term producer in games was by Trip Hawkins, who established the position when he founded Electronic Arts in 1982. His vision—influenced by his relationship with Jerry Moss—was that producers would manage artists and repertoire in the same way as in the music business, and Hawkins brought in record producers or project managers Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. It is often closely related to and sometimes conflated with Program management to monitor the progress of the developer, critique ongoing development, and assist as necessary. Most video games created by an external video game developer are paid for with periodic advances on royalties. These advances are paid when the developer reaches certain stages of development, called milestones Within the framework of project management, a milestone is the end of a stage that marks the completion of a work package or phase, typically marked by a high level event such as completion, endorsement or signing of a deliverable, document or a high level review meeting.
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Business risks
As businesses go, video game publishing is associated with high risk Risk is a concept that denotes the precise probability of specific eventualities. Technically, the notion of risk is independent from the notion of value and, as such, eventualities may have both beneficial and adverse consequences. However, in general usage the convention is to focus only on potential negative impact to some characteristic of:
- The Christmas Modern customs of the holiday include gift-giving, Church celebrations, and the display of various decorations—including the Christmas tree, lights, mistletoe, nativity scenes, and holly. Santa Claus is a popular mythological figure often associated with bringing gifts at Christmas for children. Santa is generally believed to be the result of a selling season accounts for about half of the industry's yearly sales of video and computer games, leading to a concentrated glut of high-quality competition every year in every game category, all in the fourth quarter of the year.
- Product slippage is very common due to the uncertain schedules of software development. Most publishers have suffered a "false launch", in which the development staff assures the company that game development will be completed by a certain date, and a marketing Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in launch is planned around that date, including advertising commitments, and then after all the advertising is paid for, the development staff announces that the game will "slip", and will actually be ready several months later than originally intended. When the game finally appears, the effects among consumers of the marketing launch—excitement and "buzz" over the release of the game and an intent to purchase— have dissipated, and lackluster interest leads to weak sales. An example of this is the PSP version of Spider-Man 3. These problems are compounded if the game is supposed to ship for the Christmas selling season, but actually slips into the subsequent year. Some developers (notably id id Software is an American video game development company from Mesquite, Texas. The company was founded in 1991 by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack (no relation to John Carmack). It is now considered the most influential of the many game and Epic Epic Games, also known as Epic and formerly Epic MegaGames, is a video game development company based in Cary, North Carolina. Its most recent success has been the Gears of War series of games, although it is also known for its Unreal Engine technology) have alleviated this problem by simply saying that a given game will be released "when it's done", only announcing a definite date once the game is released to manufacturing A software release is the distribution of an initial or upgraded version of a computer software product. The software engineers and company doing the work decide on how to distribute the program or system, or changes to that pre downloads and compact discs.
- There is a consensus in the industry that it has increasingly become more "hit driven" over the past decade. Consumers buy the game that's best-marketed and of the highest quality, therefore buying fewer other games in that genre. This has led to much larger game development budgets, as every game publisher tries to ensure that its game is #1 in its category.
- Games are becoming more expensive to produce. The "next generation" of consoles, particularly the Playstation 3 The PlayStation 3 is the third home video game console produced by Sony Computer Entertainment, and the successor to the PlayStation 2 as part of the PlayStation series. The PlayStation 3 competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles and Xbox 360 The Xbox 360 is the second video game console produced by Microsoft, and the successor to the Xbox. The Xbox 360 competes with Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's Wii as part of the seventh generation of video game consoles, have more advanced graphic ability than previous consoles, but taking advantage of that ability requires a larger team size than games on earlier, simpler consoles. In order to compete with the best games on these consoles, there are more characters to animate; all characters must be modeled with a higher level of detail; more textures must be created; the entire art pipeline The art pipeline is a term used to describe the entire process of creating and implementing art for a particular project, most commonly associated with the creative process for developing video games. In an era of high profile video games, wherein the creative energy of the teams and the budgets for projects surpass even some Hollywood must be made more complex to allow the creation of normal maps and more complex programming code is required to simulate physics in the game world, and to render everything as precisely and quickly as possible. On this generation of consoles, games commonly require budgets of US The United States dollar is the unit of currency of the United States The U.S. dollar is normally abbreviated as the dollar sign, $, or as USD or US$ to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies and from others that use the $ symbol. It is divided into 100 cents (200 half-cents prior to 1857)$15 million to $20 million. Activision's Spider-Man 3, for example, cost US$35 million to develop, not counting the cost of marketing and sales.[1] Every game financed is, then, a large gamble, and pressure to succeed is high.
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- Contrasting with the increased expense of "front-line" AAA console games is the casual game A casual game is a video game or online game targeted at a mass audience of casual gamers. Casual games can have any type of gameplay, and fit in any genre. They are typically distinguished by their simple rules and lack of commitment required in contrast to more complex hardcore games. They require no long-term time commitment or special skills market, in which smaller, simpler games are published for PCs and as downloadable console games. Also, Nintendo's Wii The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of both. As of December 31, 2008 the Wii leads the generation over the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in console, though debuting in the same generation as the Playstation 3 and the Xbox 360, requires a smaller development budget, as innovation on the Wii is centered around the use of the Wii Remote The Wii Remote, sometimes unofficially nicknamed "Wiimote", is the primary controller for Nintendo's Wii console. A main feature of the Wii Remote is its motion sensing capability, which allows the user to interact with and manipulate items on screen via gesture recognition and pointing through the use of accelerometer and optical sensor and not around the graphics pipeline.
- When publishing for game consoles A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or electronic device that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game. The term "video game console" is used to distinguish a machine designed for consumers to buy and use solely for playing video games from a personal, game publishers take on the burden of a great deal of inventory Inventory is a list for goods and materials, or those goods and materials themselves, held available in stock by a business. It is also used for a list of the contents of a household and for a list for testamentary purposes of the possessions of someone who has died. In accounting inventory is considered an asset risk. All significant console manufacturers since Nintendo with its NES The Nintendo Entertainment System is an 8-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America, Europe and Australia in 1985. In most of Asia, including Japan (where it was first launched in 1983), the Philippines, China, Vietnam and Singapore, it was released as the Family Computer (ファミリーコンピュータ, Famirī (1985) have monopolized the manufacture of every game made for their console, and have required all publishers to pay a royalty Copyright gives the author of an original work exclusive right for a certain time period in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a for every game so manufactured. This royalty must be paid at the time of manufacturing, as opposed to royalty payments in almost all other industries, where royalties are paid upon actual sales of the product—and, importantly, are payable for games that did not sell to a consumer. So, if a game publisher orders one million copies of its game, but half of them do not sell, the publisher has already paid the full console manufacturer royalty on one million copies of the game, and has to absorb that cost.
Investor interest
Numerous video game publishers are traded publicly on stock markets A stock market is a public market for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately. As a group, they have had mixed performance. At present, Electronic Arts Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) is an international developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of video games. Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers responsible for its games. Originally, EA was a (EA) is the only third-party publisher present in the S&P 500 The S&P 500 is a value weighted index published since 1957 of the prices of 500 large-cap common stocks actively traded in the United States. The stocks included in the S&P 500 are those of large publicly held companies that trade on either of the two largest American stock market companies; the NYSE Euronext and the NASDAQ OMX diversified list of large U.S. corporations.
Hype over video game publisher stocks has been breathless at two points:
- In the early 1990s, the introduction of CD-ROM CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer. While the compact disc format was originally designed for music storage and playback, the 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data computer drives caused hype about a multimedia Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which only use traditional forms of printed or hand-produced material. Multimedia includes a combination of text, audio, revolution that would bring interactive entertainment to the masses. Several Hollywood Hollywood is a district in Los Angeles, California, United States, situated west-northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word "Hollywood" is often used as a metonym of American cinema. The nickname Tinseltown refers to the glittering, movie studios A movie studio is, in the established sense of the term, a company that distributes films. Literally, however, the term denotes a controlled environment for the making of a motion picture. This environment may be interior (sound stage), exterior (backlot), or both. In general parlance, the term is synonymous with "major film production formed "interactive" divisions to profit in this allegedly booming new media. Most of these divisions later folded after expensively producing several games that were heavy in "full-motion video" content, but light in the quality of gameplay.
- In the United States The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the, revenue from the sales of video and computer games exceeded revenue from film Film encompasses individual motion pictures, the field of film as an art form, and the motion picture industry. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects box-office receipts for the first time in the dot-com The "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1998–2001 (with a climax on March 10, 2000 with the NASDAQ peaking at 5132.52) during which stock markets in Western nations saw their value increase rapidly from growth in the new Internet sector and related fields days of the late 1990s, when technology companies in general were surrounded by hype. The video game publishers did not, however, experience the same level of rise in stock prices that many dot-com companies saw. This was probably because video game publishing was seen as a more mature industry whose prospects were fairly well understood, as opposed to the typical exciting dot-com business model with unknown but possibly sky-high prospects. While many technology stocks were eventually destroyed in the dot-com crash in the early 2000's, the stock prices of the video game publishers recovered as a group; several of the larger publishers such as EA and Take2 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (or Take-Two, also known as Take2) is an American publisher, developer, and distributor of video games and video game peripherals. The company's headquarters are in New York City, United States, with international headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. Development studio locations include San Diego, Vancouver, achieved historical highs in the mid-2000's.
Selected video game publishers
Below are the top 20 video game publishers, ranked by Game Developer in October 2008, in order of overall score in six factors: annual turnover, number of releases, average review score, quality of producers, reliability of milestone payments and the quality of staff pay and perks.[2] Note that this is not a ranking by revenue, but of the quality of experience of working with the publishers according to staff, and some video game development companies A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers. Codemasters Codemasters is one of the longest running British video game developers. The CEO is Rod Cousens, formerly of Acclaim. In 2005, Codemasters was named as the top independent games developer by Develop Magazine, an international monthly journal for video game developers is new to the list, bumping Atlus off the list. This is the final year for Activision and Sierra Entertainment Sierra Entertainment, Inc. was a Worldwide American video game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams. Based in Los Angeles, California, the company was last owned by a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard (a subsidiary of Vivendi SA) Sierra is best known today for its multiple lines of seminal graphic/Vivendi Games to have separate listings, as the merger happened after the discussed time frame.
Notable former publishers
- 3D Realms
- 3DO (console manufacturer) (defunct)
- Acclaim Entertainment (defunct)
- Accolade (acquired by Atari née Infogrames) (defunct)
- Atari (console manufacturer) (acquired by Infogrames, which then renamed itself Atari)
- Coleco (console manufacturer) (defunct)
- Compedia
- Crystal Dynamics (subsidiary)
- Enix (merged with Squaresoft as Square Enix)
- Epyx
- Gathering of Developers (GOD) (Bought by Take-Two Interactive)
- Gremlin Interactive
- GT Interactive
- Hasbro Interactive (acquired by Infogrames)
- Iguana Entertainment
- Infocom (acquired by Activision)
- Imagic
- Interceptor Micros
- Interplay Productions
- Mattel Electronics (console manufacturer)
- Mattel (computer software)
- Maxis (acquired by Electronic Arts)
- Melbourne House (computer games and books)
- Microprose (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
- Mindscape, Inc.
- MUSE Software
- N.3.V Publishing
- Origin Systems (acquired by Electronic Arts)
- Penguin Software
- Psygnosis
- Spectrum Holobyte (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
- Square Electronic Arts L.L.C. (Owned by Square and Electronic Arts. Folded back into Square Soft, Inc. and changed to Square Enix, Inc.)
- Strategic Simulations, Inc. ("SSI")
- Technos Japan Corporation (defunct) (assets acquired by Atlus)
- US Gold (acquired by Eidos Interactive)
- Virgin Interactive Entertainment
- Westwood Studios
Some of these publishers went out of business; others were purchased or merged with a larger company, and no longer do business under this name, or they exist in name only as a brand.
See also
References
- ^ "Activision exec prices PS3 games" from Gamespot
- ^ Wilson, Trevor, Game Developer (CMP Media LLC) 15 (9), October 2008, http://www.gamasutra.com /view/feature3800game_developer_magazines_top_20_.php
Categories: Video game development
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