Publishing 101: What Game to Build, Why, and Which Publisher is Right for You by John Wright

would impact the metrics, which in turn would then, as part of the due diligence process, would fail anyway. So it's very important.
And then my advice for you right now is if you can bake some form of meta progression into the game at this stage, I know that's adding more complexity to the game, but it just shows the potential and direction and publishers like to see that so if you can do it great feeling shackle bringing the inside we're rocking those vibes so the early day looks to 14-part series where I am going to go through and ask some of the big important questions that you are all dying to know about publishing. I think there is some really really good and positive sentiment around publishing in the current market.
There are still some people that have some concerns and some negative sentiment, but

publishing in general, I think, is a very strong strategy and way that developers can

superpower their games and utilize, you know, big companies' expertise and all of the other

benefits, including funding and whatever else is needed right now.

So today, I'm going to answer a very simple question, which which is what is the current state of publishing within mobile games today? Right now the current state of publishing for mobile is actually in a very good place and you know we saw some really standout successes from the likes of Lion with Hexasole and Rollic with Twisty Tangle there was a of Screw Games, a lot of other very interesting sort of Block Blast-esque games that came to market, Bus Jam and all of this other stuff that really, from a casual and hybrid casual perspective, really started defining, or for the first time, started defining what truly what hybrid casual would be. So it was a very interesting year.
We saw a lot of growth in companies that specialized in this type of publishing and yeah I think overall it was very positive. We saw growth in the area which is great.
So but to clarify why I think publishing is growing and it's taking off and why it's so important in today's market, I've listed three main points and focuses that I want to talk about today. So the first one is talking about the absence of funding, right? So if we recall, you know, a couple of years ago, there was accessibility to funds was much higher.
You know, gaming VCs were investing much more money than they are today. And if you look at the first image in the comment section, you'll see the most recent Gaming VC funding graph from Convoy.
And what we can easily see here is a couple of things. So the first thing is that it's a five-year low in terms of investment into games okay which means that yeah there is less money around and if there is less money being deployed by VCs that means developers are or do not have the accessibility funds they need to correctly build games and then launch games.
So the inaccessibility to money makes teams have to focus even more. Whereas a few years ago, if we look at 2021, there was about 10 billion deployed.
In 2024, there was less than 2 billion deployed. It was a fifth of the amount of money.
And if we also look at the stages of the cash deployment,

it was predominantly early stage. And what we look at in terms of early stage is effectively VCs running money to help developers build prototypes, MVPs, or early stage projects.
That in turn means that there is not enough money there for teams to start doing things like marketing, influencers, UAE in general.

So very simply, the funding aspect of things means that developers will need someone who can help them with other parts of getting their game launched and making it a successful business. So again, this is not me trash talking VCs.
This is me saying the VCs are investing in one aspect or one point of the game's evolution and working with a publisher will allow you to take the game to market. So yeah, that's the first point.
The second point is actually a follow on of the first point, which is lean teams need to focus on what they do best. So as a developer, what I advise people to do right now is stay lean and focus on the core facts of game development.
So that is have a strong, strong founding team, you know, product, engineering and obviously CEO, business type guy, and then having the bulk of your focus on engineering and effectively building the best sort of prototype or MVP you possibly can. Then you can utilize the publisher's very wide range of expertise and funding for user acquisition and getting the game to market.
So yeah, third point, again, just touched on it briefly, but publishers, you know, bring an invaluable expertise and technology. So what does that mean? So not only is the publisher someone who could effectively spend millions of dollars on user acquisition and handle the growth loop side of things, so monet and user acquisition and creating you know positive profit driven games but if you are developing an early stage product and you have you know a core loop you know and an original mechanic you know that's amazing right that's something unique and that's innovation and that's what people want to see.
But taking something from, you know, the ideation stage to hard launch is something completely different. This requires a much wider range of skill set.
You need product people, you need producers, you need designers, you need artists, you need PMM, you need user acquisition, you need monetization, you need a wide, wide range of skills. And, you know, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, it takes a village to raise a baby, but it takes an army to build a game.
And I really believe in that a publisher will, again, bring so much more additional value with the additional expertise, but equally they have some of the best technology in the market has to offer. And this technology, these third-party partnerships or internally built technology is very expensive.
And developers generally don't have the accessibility of funds to do such things. So working with a publisher gives you the financial support you need.
It gives you the marketing support you need, again, which is additional funds. It gives you additional expertise in terms of people and the disciplines that they have and it gives you the accessibility to technology that you would never be able to afford without it so that is why I believe right now if you want to maximize your chances as a small developer without having a big you know amount of money behind you from potentially a you know big raise from bc that working with a publisher will solve a lot of your problems and ultimately what i want more than anything is to see growth in gaming this year and to do that there has to be a combination of you know developers and publishers putting more games out and yeah that's that's what I really hope for our industry this year

and we're going to talk about another very big subject which is what game to build why and what publisher is right for you so just before we start I really want to make sure that everyone understands what I mean by VC thesis and publishing thesis so a lot of people are not aware aware of this, but if you're an amazing studio with an incredible game and you're looking to raise money for a VC, a lot of the time, if your game is not in line with their strategy, i.e. their thesis, they will not invest money into the studio.
Why? This is because where the fund has raised the money from lps and such

they've done it on the basis of telling these people we are investing in these games these

projects these type of companies and that means that even if your game is fantastic if you pick

the wrong vc you still won't go after it and it's very similar to publishing and i think a lot of

people are not aware of this so i'm going to go into a bit more detail today around this so yeah

Thank you. It's very similar to publishing, and I think a lot of people are not aware of this.
So I'm going to go into a bit more detail today around this. So, yeah, three points that I think are really important when coming down to what game to build, why, and which publisher to choose is, in my opinion, there's two big, big types of strategies.
And there's multiple smaller strategies, but overall, if we go to the top level, there's two main ones. So the first one is what I refer to as true innovation.
True innovation is when you come up with something completely new. This is, you know, Roblox or Minecraft or, you know, something that is defining in every way.
You've never seen it before. Fortnite when it came out.
These are the big ones. So the upside to these are very simple.
If you manage to do it and you crack it, it's an entirely new area where if the market responds well to it, you're going to get huge amounts of users. You're going to make tons money right so that is one one part of it the downside however is nearly all of them fail because the market's not ready for it the market reception's not not you know not there so yeah look you can start with 0.1 you know going after true innovation but it's very very difficult Or the second one, which is what I refer to as the plus one strategy.
So a plus one strategy effectively is taking an existing game, and this could be, you know, I give the example here about a match free going to match 3D, right? So this could be, you're looking at a lot of match free games, you know, they're very dominant in the market, and you say to yourself, what can I do to change this, to bring this into a new light where I can add an element of innovation rather than building complete innovation?

And, you know, match 3D hit the market. And this was just an evolution of match free.
Right.

This is instead of doing, you know, moving three pieces into a line within a board.

It was adding a 3D element. So there were pieces on top of each other, not just next to each other.

So this is, you know, traditionally what a plus one strategy is. And the upside is very simple.
It's lower risk. It's faster to validate.
You've got examples in market which you can compare to. And people often, you know, adopt it much easier because it's familiar it's not completely new the downside is obviously the saturation and and you know lots of potentially other ones in the market and so you one you need to be quick and two you need to make the innovation enough so it differentiates from the rest of the pack so two do your market research and I can't you know stress this enough but you can't build in a vacuum you you have to build something that the market is responding well to you can't just make something up you have to look at the signals and my advice here is to use all the data tools you can so I use sensor tower because i have access to it but it's you know it's expensive there's other platforms out there like app magic and new zoo and other free tools which you can get data please do do it if you don't have premium tools then just scrape the store find what's in the charts find find trends you know like said last year, at one point, I remember there was seven or eight screw games in the top 100.
So you can see them, you can find them, take your shot, innovate, and then see what happens. And sometimes you can knock the king off the castle.
And then last point, industry reports. There's loads and loads of stuff out there by AppsFlyer, by InvestGame,

all of these companies.

Go and do it.

Third point, find the right publisher.

Finding the right publisher is extremely important because, you know,

you could submit one of the best games ever.

But again, if it doesn't align with their thesis,

then it could be an instant rejection.

You need to be aware of that. And you need to do research into the publishers to make sure.
That is right for them. OK, so this is why publishing is a partnership.
It has to match on both sides. Right.
So don't be downhearted if you do get rejected first, because it does happen and it could be out of your control. So yeah, like I said, I'm going to give an example here.
If you're making a $10 million MOBA and you pitch it to a publisher that's doing hybrid casual with a 500k budget, then even if it's the best MOBA in the world, it won't get signed because it doesn't match what they're looking for. So you can ask them this.
You can reach out to them and say, what is your publishing thesis? What is the deal size? What is driving you right now? And a couple of points I say here that I think would be good is check out their portfolios and look at the App Store under their account. See what type of games they're working on and see if your game is in line with what they've done previously.
That's a really good thing to start. Google the names of their execs, find their VP of publishing, find their CEO, find interviews in Pocket Gamer, in TechCrunch, look at interviews on Deconstructor of Fun, find what they're talking about and how they're positioned in it.
It's really important. And then also, guys, don't just blanket send pitches and decks it's i saw hundreds and hundreds of decks over my time at quietly and i would have wished if people would have tailored the decks a bit more then more of them would have probably got through to the green light stage and i'll cover green light and due diligence in a future podcast but yeah final, final thought, success isn't always about building a great game.
It's about building the right game for the right reasons and pitching it to the right publisher. You can't just do a scattergun approach.
You need to be highly strategic, picking the right people, and then your chances of success go up dramatically. And I'm going to answer another big question, which is how do publishers find and sign new games? I think it's really important for the developers out there to understand the processes that publishers take to find games.
because ultimately being discoverable is very important for you

if you eventually want to work with a publisher,

get signed by a publisher, launch a game using the publisher's extensive needs. So the first point I want to go over today is around the people behind the game discovery.
So who is it, whose job is it to actually find the games? So there's two sort of major ways of looking at this. So one is there's a biz dev team or a sourcing team.
So essentially, these are the same things. Sourcing is normally what we refer to in PCC.
Biz dev is really what we refer to in mobile. But essentially, these are people tasked with one job, which is going out there and finding new, exciting games.

And by the way, it doesn't always have to be early projects either.

Some strategies from certain publishers will look for games

that are nearer completion because that is part of their publishing thesis.

And I've gone over that quite a lot over the last couple of days.

So I think hopefully this will start to sink in about strategy around publishers and what they're looking for um but yeah or the other you know point two is a publishing manager so a publishing manager effectively encompasses not only the business development parts and finding the game but they also encompass the uh sort of um developer management of the game so they find the game they sign the game and then they retain the developer relationship from a commercial strategy and point and perspective this could mean that you know in years to come there would be other games other launches and that person already holds the relationship to be able to utilize that to ensure that those second, third, fourth projects eventually, you know, come back to the publisher because we have established a partnership. And we're going to talk about partnerships in publishing between developers and publishers later in the series, but it's something that's really, really important.
So how the next part of this is, ultimately, how do people find the games? So, you know, looking for the games now. You know the titles.
You can find them quite easily by searching LinkedIn and marrying them up to different publishers that you want to. So this is how you find the people you need to speak to.
But how do they actually find the games? It's a tough question, right? Each company has slightly different strategy, tools, ways, and all and all of that but ultimately there's a couple of points here that really highlight the basics so they're looking at the app store a hell of a lot so they're trying to find new game submissions and seeing what's what's looking good by playing them you know through through the store like downloading playing they're analyzing the market so they're using sense tower at magic etc to find again new games that look like they've got good uh sort of metrics or whatever metrics they can find from the data platforms they're checking platforms like itch so it's just great for early stage prototypes and coming up with new concepts i think it's a bit of an unsung hero in our industry if i'm honest honest. They use internal systems, so taxonomies, scrapers, and some people even get day-to-day reports of all new games submitted.
And again, taxonomy, so what type of game they are, who's the studio, all of that stuff. And then a big one, and maybe not an obvious one to some developers because they're not outgoing is attending industry events

talks you know panels all of this kind of stuff so it's really important to get out there and meet the publishers so i put together five ways for you to improve your chances of getting signed so the first one again this could be just a little bit of common sense but you'll be surprised at at how many people put games out before they're ready,

is make sure your game

is ready to be played.

So what I mean by that is it doesn't need a huge amount of content, one to two hours

worth of content, it's completely acceptable, but it needs to be enough content to show

the true vision of the game and the core mechanic and everything else, but also make sure you've tested it and there's no bugs, because if a publisher looks at the game and then you know the core mechanic and everything else but also make sure it's you've tested it and there's no bugs because if a publisher looks at the game and there's bugs they'll just you know say no this doesn't work or it would impact the metrics which in turn would then as part of the due diligence process would fail anyway so it's very important and then my advice for you right now is if you can bake some form of meta progression into the game at this stage, I know that's adding more complete complexity to the game, but it just shows the potential and direction and publishers like to see that. So if you can do it, great.
Second point, again, I just spoke about leverage industry events. They are a goldmine for you because every publisher will send different people under the guise of we need to sign new games.
So these people are literally there for one reason only. It's a great way to grab their attention.
The idea of events is not to get something signed there and then, but it's to create a bond relationship, a connection a connection with someone in the BizTef sourcing team, et cetera, and then establish, okay, next week we'll have a follow-up or the week after we'll have a follow-up and to kick the can down that road. Again, all major publishers send people.
It's really important when you could end up meeting 10, 15 different publishers within a couple of days, and it could be a massive impact to your potential chances to get signed. Build strong relationship with publishers.
So even if the game you have right now does not get signed, it doesn't mean that in the future, the publisher won't be interested. So it's important to establish relationships and cultivate them.
So if, for example, a publisher gives you some feedback, you know, and then you develop, you know, you utilize that in the product and develop that, then after you've completed that, send them an update with a new build saying, hey, look, we really took on your feedback. Here's the new project.
Have it applied? What do you think? And just keep those conversations open because the relationships are very important because equally, you want to build advocacy internally. Because if you have a champion and that person is your champion in the publisher, that can sometimes push things through or people take a leap of faith on you.
So really, really important. Understand what publishers are looking for.
And I can't stress this enough over the last couple of days. understand the publishing thesis, the criteria, the deal side, the game preferences.

All of these things will help you get signed better or quicker okay so ask them questions don't let it all just be them asking you and yeah if the game doesn't fit their vision at least you know early and then you can start tailoring your approach to different publishers where it would be a fit very important and then last point again which is I think underrated is handle rejection with resilience so a no isn't all the time about your game or your studio it could be the fact that the publisher has 10 projects in the works right now and doesn't have time or the ability or or resources to get another project to market so you know they want to they won't be able to even if they wanted to it could be the deal size it could be the portfolio fit it could be a bunch of different reasons but collect the feedback identify the trends iterate your project and and work on the next game and then again you have that next project, report back to the publisher and go from there. And yeah, keep the publisher updated.
It's really important. And final thought, publishing is a competitive space, but understand how the process works gives you an edge.
So look, stay strategic, stay adaptable, keep the relationships there, continue to work on things, and I assure you, your likelihood to get signed and work with a publisher will go up dramatically. And learning about the publishing teams themselves and how they find games and their strategies is how they do so.
So today we're going to talk about two predominant strategies. One is farming and one is hunting.
And you may be familiar with these terms because they're very common terms in a lot of different types of companies and business development and sales in general. But the first one obviously being, being farming.
So this is a come-to-us approach. So this is the publisher is doing marketing, is doing PR, is building a platform that allows you to submit games, is establishing automation so that you can test the games and they can get results at mass.
This is very much a quantitative approach to publishing. And I think, you know, again, the differentiation between farming and hunting is one is quantitative and one is qualitative.
But we'll go into more of that later. So, yeah, if you look at the biggest publishers in mobile today, Voodoo, Supersonic, Quali, et cetera, et cetera, you'll see a number of these guys have their own publishing portals or platforms associated to their website so this means that you know if i wanted to submit my game to voodoo i go back to the website click on publishing and then there's a section that allows me to essentially put a bulk of information a link to the game and then getting someone at Voodoo to review it.
And the idea is that these submissions get counted up at the end of every day, and then depending on the number of B2BD people they have internally, each one of them will go through 10, 20, 50, depending on how many you get a month. And then essentially they'll spend x amount of time reviewing each of these games seeing which ones have the um the right amount of potential and those ones would then be approved to go towards testing and as i explained there is a lot of automation in these publishing platforms to date so a lot of them will allow you to do you know upload creatives and basically go live on Facebook and the publisher will spend $100, $200 testing your game to understand CPI and early stage retention and stuff like that.
So it's very important to understand that this process, again, is very quantitative. There is tons of applications, so you need to stand out.
We'll talk about that at the end of the video. So another very important thing that you need to understand is that from a farming strategy, you normally get, I would say, anywhere between one in 300 to one in 500 going to launch.
So what this means is, you know, there's less than a percent of games being submitted through the portals that actually go to being signed and launched and it's because the quality of the submissions isn't arguably always quite low so you do get some diamonds in the rough and one of the best games i've ever worked on came through a submission and you know if you have it as established by your publishing process, then I definitely think it's a vital strategy.

Hunting. So the difference.
And again, we covered this off a lot yesterday talking about the BD team, what their role is within that and notably what they are there to do. So the hunting strategy is a go to them strategy.
So this is the PD team essentially are doing everything that I explained yesterday, looking at, you know, the store pages, looking at LinkedIn, using tools internally to see what games have been submitted and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, they're effectively also looking at other publishers and seeing what other studios are being published by them and trying to talk to these people.
and it's about building out rapport on their site right because the better studios they sign the

more games that launch and then notably their bonuses and stuff like financial incentives are normally linked to you know success so for the for the bd people and the publishing team it's really important to make sure they're spending their right amount of time on the right people again what you'll notice about them is they'll probably contact you on linkedin or email and they'll say, hey, it would be great to talk about your game. Can we jump on a call? Here's my calendar, etc, etc.
And again, the focus is very much on quantity, so quality, not quantity. So the mix of farming and hunting gives both quantity and quality to the publisher and the BD team.
But if I was going to say which one gets the higher priority, it's the hunting, not the farming. Because hunting, again, has a much more targeted approach and the conversion to success is much higher.
So with hunting, it could be one in 20 or one in 50 compared to one in 300 or one in 500 with farming. So really important to understand those two processes and how, you know, the BD teams in publishers work.
So if I was going to give you three pieces of advice on how you can improve your likelihood to be detected, you know, be remembered and everything else, I would say say and again this might be common sense but you'll be surprised how many people don't do it optimize your portal submission make sure you give as much data and as much information about the studio the game the design again any previous data from tests that you might have done with another publisher or that you've had internally. The more information, the better, because the more information provided, the better the BD teams can do in terms of making a decision.
What you don't want to do is not put enough information and just be rejected because there was something vital missing and they have to move quickly onto the next thing. So yeah, please make sure you do that.
Two, proactively connect with the BD team. So this can either be at events like what we spoke about yesterday, or it can be through LinkedIn.
So go to the LinkedIn page of the publisher, find the people in business development, publishing management, or sourcing, you know, just drop them, one of them, an email or again, a message on LinkedIn and say hey this is me i submitted my game i really like what you do and just try and you know keep it light and and fresh and friendly but the idea is that you're trying to establish a contact uh contact internally you're trying to find that and then build an advocate in there and building out rapport is very very important third point personalize your approach and this is again something that i see time and time again especially when you know for people both hunting and farming actually so so essentially if if someone if you submit your game through the portal make sure that again the submission is tailored to be in line with everything you know about the publisher or if it's someone has approached you and they've contacted you you know as part of a hunting strategy then make sure you tailor any follow-up or deck with the publisher in mind because if you show that you're giving it the time and attention it deserves you're more likely to eventually you know build, get signed. And also remember, it's not always about the game you have now.
It could be the game in a year or the game in two years or the game five games down the line. It's about like once you've got that relationship, it's very easy to go back to that.
And the industry is full of goodwill so look my final thought is whether the publisher

is leveraging farming or hunting strategies it doesn't matter but knowing how they operate can

make all of the difference in getting your game noticed thank you and have a good day Thank you.