I think Introversion occupies something of an unusual space within the industry. 

Despite only having ten employees we have managed to release three critically acclaimed titles and are about to release our fourth with Multiwinia in September.  We have prided ourselves on the fact that each game is radically different to the one that came before (except perhaps Multiwinia, which is a multiplayer game inspired by our second-title, Darwinia) and we are making a strong return to that philosophy with the two games that are currently in the IV pipeline.

Introversion has always been fairly candid about its attitude towards publishers. Indeed, we have used publishers very sparing along the way, as we believe that in general they offer poor value for money and many of the services offered can be better implemented in house – this leads us to the even more unusual position of having half of our team involved in sales, marketing and management and the other half involved in development.

Since 2001 we have developed our own on-line download system and store (accounting for 50% of our revenue) we have launched EFIGS versions of all of our titles through our store and also through global retail channels.  We have successfully negotiated a first-party port of Darwinia and Multiwinia on Xbox Live Arcade and were the second non-Valve game to be released on Steam.  We have boot-strapped our organisation, using money from previous games to invest in developing the team and producing the next game, and since the infamous Darwinia years we have always been in the black.  Each of the games has been supported with an extensive PR campaign, and we have sold over 200,000 games whilst building a loyal community of 30,000 fans.

We have achieved all these things and yet I still see fellow developers dominated by publishers who fail to understand the creative process and consistently (and short-sightedly) consider in-year returns to be a higher priority than taking the time necessary to create a great title.  I really believe that publishers need to be treated as Service Providers to developers.  Developers should see themselves as the customers; we are in charge, we have the ideas, we make the games and we should decide whether to use a particular service provider, or not, to distribute our games.

For a moment, let us forget about the funding of game development and instead look at the other services that publishers actually offer.  Consider the following list:
 

Now consider whether or not you could provide the same service in house?  Do you have any means to tell what’s going on in the global gaming market place?  Do any of your staff play games for example? Is a market survey more reliable than the expert opinion of your dev team?  Could you manage your own QA, or could you negotiate with a QA outsourcing house?  How much would this cost? Is it cheaper than your publisher?  Ask the same questions about the other services?  Could you hire a dedicated PR person to look after your marketing?  Are there any other services not listed above? Could you handle those in-house too?

My point is that Introversion is in a very strong position precisely because we believe that the current publisher-developer relationship is broken, and we have been very successful by only contracting those services that we definitely cannot perform in house, and we also make sure that we are paying a fair price when we do outsource.  Now either Introversion is a freak company (which I don’t believe), or other organisations are simply not going back to basics and really thinking about the fundamentals of their business and whether they are getting value for money from the publishers.

Not only are developers being financially disadvantaged by working with publishers, I think there is often a mismatch of values that makes the partnerships even more destructive in the long term.  We recently embarked on a project and it became clear that the quality of the final game was of less interest to our publisher than the launch window.  We were absolutely horrified as we couldn’t imagine how they could even consider releasing a game that was 75% completed in order to get it out before the Christmas rush.  To us the game is King, must be King, and if we need to take a little longer to get it right then there is no question about what course of action we will take.  It is clear to me now that our corporations are built on fundamentally different values and I do not believe that it is healthy to try to make a relationship like this work.  I would encourage other developers to ask themselves the same question before blindly going into the next deal with a publisher.

And now I must return to the million-dollar question that relates to the millions of dollars required to develop a modern game.  I suspect that because most developers look to publishers to provide the development funding, then all of the arguments above (no matter how salient) simply evaporate compared with the requirement to put bread on the table.  Sadly I do not have an answer for this.  At Introversion we have grown slowly using funding from a previous game to fund the next however had we started in a different way it would have be very difficult to escape the cycle.

Perhaps this sticking point is too great.  Too big a challenge to overcome, or perhaps not.  Perhaps there are small projects that could be used as a pilot to test publisher-free releases? Perhaps there is some operating capital that could be tapped into? Perhaps the shareholders could be convinced to take a smaller dividend with a view to making more downstream (best of luck with this one).  All I do know is that it is down to the developers to break the tyranny of the publishers and get back to doing what we’ve always wanted to do – making great games.