The Growing Publisher Pool

You might have noticed that there were fewer publishers with 10 or more titles in the 2005 graph than in the 2006 or 2007 graphs. In fact, this is a hint that the number of publishers in the console and handheld space has been growing each year. Here's how it breaks down:



The colors above break down the publisher population in each year by how many titles they publish. Clearly the number of publishers has risen each of the past two years.

As you can see, there is a pool of about 40 publishers who produce anywhere from one to five games each year. Despite the stable number, this is a very volatile population. Some of these are self-publishing developers on a service like Xbox Live, like Jeff Minter's Llamasoft. Others, like Myelin Media, are publishers that appear briefly and then disappear after a couple of games. (According to Wikipedia, Myelin Media was a “privately-held publisher owned by the hedge fund Icahn Associates Corporation"; they appeared just long enough to publish a cross-platform poker game starring Daniel Negreanu and haven't produced anything else since.) And a few are actually stable, like Valcon Games which publishes a couple of budget-priced games every year. (This segment of the market is also home to some of the more unique publisher names. My favorite, by far, is Zuxxez, pronounced like success without a hint of irony.)

More interestingly, the growth segments are the groups producing 6-to-15 and 16-to-30 titles per year. At first, one might think these are smaller publishers moving up, but that's not necessarily the case. Yes, DSI is producing more games in 2007 than it produced in 2005, but at the same time Sony is responsible for fewer games in 2007 than it was in 2005. The same is true of Nintendo, which had almost 40 games in 2005 and only 30 games in 2007.

Just How Big is Big?

Finally, I took every publisher with more than 10 games in 2007 and ranked them by output. As you look at this graph, keep in mind the two biggest publisher stories of the past few months: Activision Blizzard and EA bidding for Take-Two.



For the past three years, the combined output of EA and Take Two is around 150 titles each year. If EA were to acquire Take Two, certainly some redundancies would be eliminated, but the result would still be a publisher of probably 130 or more products per year in the console and handheld market. As of now, their nearest competitors are Activision with around 80 titles per year and THQ with around 70.

On the other hand, a post-merger Activision Blizzard would be a publisher of about as many titles as EA is producing now, just over 100.

Of course, growth is not a given after a merger, as one can see in the case of Namco and Bandai. In 2005 those two publishers collectively produced over 50 games. After they completed their merger, I was only able to count around 30 titles published by the resulting Bandai Namco Games in 2007.

While these figures don't account for what is perhaps the truly important figure – revenue – they are at least an indication of the kind of influence that a larger EA and a larger Activision might have on the market. Should both of these publisher deals go forward, the result would be two huge publishers who collectively publish over 250 console and handheld games every 12 months, a significant percentage of the market in any given year.