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Originally Posted by PurpleCow
I have seen so many articles talking about how publishers screwed over game developers and ruined games with unrealistic expectations and forcing game developers to change product features.
Why are they needed and what do they do? In this day and age of digital releases why is a publisher needed? Do development studios like Killerfish Games make use of publishers? They did extremely well with Cold Waters as well as other games.
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If you self-publish, you have to do all marketing yourself, and this eats into development time, and you may even not be very good at it, which limits your potential market penetration. A publisher on the other hand deals entirely with marketing and employ people whose sole job is to maintain contact with the media outlets and influencers.
There's also a huge difference if your studio is self-funding its projects, or if it functions on a work-for-hire basis, which was very often the case back in the day. In the latter case, either the studio pitches a concept to the publisher, who funds it, or the studio has a concept and shops around for a studio to develop it.
Just like in the movie and music industries, if the publisher funds you up front, they expect to earn back that investment, and this is usually done by withholding your royalty payments until the product has earned back the advance. So you can see that if your game or movie or album flops under this model, you don't get paid and you're in big trouble.
Keep in mind that Cold Waters had no marketing beyond word of mouth and being featured by YT influencers. Who knows how much better it could have done with more extensive marketing? That question is why we elected to partner with MicroProse. And of course we get to resurrect a brand we grew up with and cherished as gamers, and that opportunity is exciting!