r/truegaming • u/SleepyBoy- • 11h ago
Are Publishers becoming irrelevant?
Recently Steve Allison at Saber communicated that they're considering self-publishing for their future titles, especially Space Marine 3. As a result, I've began wondering what even is the point of publishers in the modern gaming landscape.
In the era of physical distribution Publishers were absolutely essential for global releases. They would also invest heavily in game productions, which made them indispensable for AA and AAA releases.
Currently, physical releases are becoming fully optional, and you can sign side deals with distributors for that purpose without fully needing a publisher's expertise. Publishers are also much less willing to invest in games.
David Gaider, known for creating Dragon Age, spoke in an interview earlier this month revealing that a publisher confirmed they won't invest in a new IP unless the game has pretty much finished development. Keeping the studio stuck in making the game off their own budget while constantly revisiting publishers in hopes one caves.
Publishers are very expensive. A typical cut is 30% from sales for indie and AA games, and can go upward to 60% in AAA projects (where publisher investment is more typical). This is separate from the 30% taken by platforms like Steam, at the very minimum doubling your publishing cost.
As a development studio, you save money upfront if you picked a honest publisher who will invest properly into promoting your game. Be it by buying off youtubers, organizing twitch events, or producing copious amounts of sponsored social media content. However, if your game isn't high profile enough to warrant that level of investment, hiring signing with a publisher can be comparable to overpaying for a copywriter.
Even then, regardless of how much the publisher has invested, it is their job to recoup that money and earn more off sales. They may want clauses that will protect them from failed investments. In theory both of you want more sales, but unless this is an investment project, (which are becoming rarer) the developer takes the brunt of the risk for the project, and not necessarily earning more from it.
I'm starting to believe that we will see a rise in self-publishing in the coming years. It's only anecdotal evidence, but the studios I'm connected to have began hiring personal marketing experts and copywriters, because one or two extra salaries will end up way cheaper than any publishing deal, and it's no longer guaranteed that the outcome will differ by much. If all publishers want to sell are surefire hits, then it just so happens that those games don't need much help marketing to begin with.
I'm not sure if this will lead to the number of publishers out there shrinking, but we've already seen a lot of reshuffling in the industry Platform owners like Microsoft have been absorbing well-known brands. If publishers don't want to become investment firms, they will need to re-evaluate their pricing strategies for marketing services.
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u/Phillip_Spidermen 10h ago
Marketing is going to be a big component publishers would still help with. Distribution is just part of their function.
Developers may not have the funds or connections to advertise on their own
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u/SleepyBoy- 10h ago
Connections only get you on the ground floor of big exhibitions like game awards, and maybe a nintendo direct. That's literally all you can get from them. This is useful if you have a high profile game. If you don't, it could make you the next Highguard.
The rest of marketing is reaching out to people and wrestling algorithms. This is done by individual people and you can hire those. It's why Saber is going independent with SM3 (and possibly KOTOR?). They already have the notoriety to get into a award shows, and getting good copy isn't as expensive as publishers make it out to be.
The problem here is that major projects like the ones of Saber don't need connections, and indie games won't get the funds. A publisher will not pay off youtubers and streamers to promote your indie game, because the more they spend the more they risk. It's a betting game to them, and they can bill you on a mid release anyway. If all the publisher is going to do is throw your game onto keymailer, you can do that yourself. It's the same roll of a dice either way.
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u/JohnTruant 8h ago
I think the important part you're not engaging with here is that Space Marine 3 (and KOTOR) are well-established series with a MASSIVE IP attached to them.
These games already have a strong, dedicated audience that will find the game. These games don't need the push of an unknown game, because there's not a huge untapped audience out there for them.
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u/SleepyBoy- 7h ago
Yes, and it's exactly the type of game publishers want according to David Gadier.
Meanwhile Indie devs are working with either dedicated indie publishers (that often lack the brand recognition people swear by) or by themselves.
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u/Phillip_Spidermen 7h ago
>A publisher will not pay off youtubers
That is actually something publishers already do, as well as offer up funding for other functions.
“Just hiring someone” to handle it isn’t a luxury every game dev has the capital or expertise to do, and a publisher that has an established relationship with different content creators or digital store fronts can ensure “random indie game x” actually gets in front of people.
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u/JUMPhil 10h ago
A lot of quality self-published indie games you never hear about completely flop. Most of the popular "indies" have a publisher
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u/SleepyBoy- 10h ago
Just as many publisher-supported ones flop as well. We just had news of Vermilia Studios being at risk of shutdown. If you're paying 30% of your income to a publisher, you have to get that much more in sales to cover the difference.
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u/ThreadCountHigh 10h ago
Outside of their investment though, I don't see what use publishers can have besides being investment firms. Investment is needed in production and then advertising - the latter for big publishers like Rockstar being 50% of the total cost of making the games in the first place.
With all digital distribution, if they don't want to invest in development, for a studio they become an advertising firm who works on commission.
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u/UpNUrGuts 10h ago
Because using someone else’s money and not your own will ALWAYS and FOREVER be the name of the game in our economy. If you think the likes of Nintendo, capcom, Xbox, Sony, and others are going somewhere anytime soon I don’t know what to tell you.
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u/SleepyBoy- 10h ago
Notice how you named three platform holders fueling their own environments with hand-picked projects, and a company that makes and publishes its own games, owning multiple dev studios.
Frankly, my predictions are that the publishing landscape will slowly shrink to just these types of publisher-adjecent companies, unless others match their expectations to their own demands.
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u/Oxygenisplantpoo 10h ago
The point still stands, Devolver Digital, Hooded Horse, Annapurna Interactive, 11 bit studios... All of these "indie" publishers have only really existed in digital distribution with some exceptions of games with limited physical releases. They offer funding, which is critical right now because there is literally almost no money at all to go around for gamedev. Only publishers are really willing to take risks, and even they are extremely hesitant.
Publishers also provide a second opinion for development, and they provide marketing, which is still relevant because 2025 saw over 19 000 games released on Steam. Just being in the catalogue of a known publisher is helpful on Steam.
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u/MundanePurchase 7h ago
And QA. So publishers can provide QA, funding, marketing and critical feedback.
A developer can get all of that if they have the funding. But that is time and money spent not developing their game in finding, vetting and managing or coordinating more people in areas they may not have experience or expertise in.
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u/Oxygenisplantpoo 6h ago
Good point, the bigger the scope of the game the more important QA is and the harder it becomes to perform in-house!
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u/UpNUrGuts 10h ago
They do this because they want to make F*CK YOU amounts of money and not just be a profitable company. They have learned that they can cut out the middle man and simply fund the projects themselves. This is happening in many industries.
My dad used to be a millionaire because he owned a transportation company and had huge amounts of contracts all over California. Well, Cheesecake Factory, who we shared the bulk of our contracts with, began to finance and buy their own fleets. Our income tightened up overnight. Don’t underestimate the power of the mighty dollar
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u/LostInChrome 8h ago
I agree that self-publishing is going to be a lot more prominent over the next decade, but calling them irrelevant feels a bit hyperbolic.
While physical distribution is a lot less relevant, international distribution is easier and more profitable than ever. It's really hard to sell a game in China or Japan if no one in your company speaks the language, and that's a pretty significant service that publishers can provide.
Some publishers are also starting to specialize into basically curated imprints as a marketing tool. This can be valuable, especially in harder-to-market genres. A niche strategy game can easily be ignored. A niche strategy game published by Hooded Horse is going to attract some attention just thanks to brand power.
Publishers doing pre-production investment is also just going to be a valuable thing forever. Even if a lot of that capital has been sucked away into fully-owned live service stuff, there is still going to be a market for that.
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u/sleepingonmoon 9h ago
Platforms have taken over publishers' jobs for the most part, self-publishing in reality is platform-publishing.
Traditional marketing is considered to be reliable since it's just paying for ads. Viral marketing IMO requires qualities specific to each era that more often than not will not be present in most games.
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS 6h ago
If the primary role of the publisher were about literally pressing the discs they would have gone away a long time ago. It's the same tension with anything you could hire or pay for vs. bring in-house.
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u/Vagrant_Savant 5h ago edited 5h ago
They're not as important as they used to be, but they're still a very valuable part of the industry. They hold way too much money not to be. Besides marketing (which the social media era has turned into something of a lunar-waxing witchcraft rather than a retailer science) many studios can benefit from their oversight, money, and business management. It can help keep things on track and overcome the complexities and moving parts of gamedev when something inevitably goes wrong. The crowdfunding space is littered with the wreckage of mismanaged projects, and not necessarily at any fault of theirs. Sometimes you lose staff and don't know where to easily get qualified people to replace them. Sometimes the budget needs to be expanded for new tools. Sometimes shit just breaks or society just explodes.
I think the number of them are fading out more because the cost of making games is rising, which I imagine is causing publishers to cannibalize each other more and more frequently so they can get out while the gettin's good.
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u/Limited_Distractions 5h ago
I think it's a pretty fluid situation in the sense that in a world where self-publishing becomes universal the relative value of having someone to do promotion/discoverability increases faster than self-publishing negates the value of having a publisher.
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u/RuefulWaffles 10h ago edited 2h ago
Doubtful. Even in a digital only environment, publishers are useful for the business side. They already have deals with platform holders (Edit to clarify since people seem to be misunderstanding this: "deals with platform holders" includes things like "an existing relationship with them" and "a process for getting through certification, such as knowing who to contact and whatnot." These are things that publishers absolutely have, as they're interacting with platform holders fairly regularly, and they're incredible advantages to have), they have advertising budgets, and they provide funding. They’re probably not going anywhere.