A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer. Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view A video game is a Game that involves interaction with a User interface to generate visual feedback on a video device. A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual that creates Video games A developer may specialize in a certain video
As with book publishers or publishers of DVD movies, video game publishers are responsible for their product's manufacturing and marketing, including market research and all aspects of advertising. Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view DVD (also known as " Digital Versatile Disc " or " Digital Video Disc " - see Etymology)is Manufacturing (from Latin manu factura, "making by hand" is the use of tools and labor to make things for use or sale In popular usage "marketing" is the promotion of products especially Advertising and Branding However in professional usage the term has a wider meaning of Market research is the process of systematically gathering recording and analyzing data and information about Customers, Competitors and the Market Advertising is a form of Communication that typically attempts to persuade potential Customers to Purchase or to consume more of a particular Brand They usually finance the development, sometimes by paying a video game developer (the publisher calls this external development) and sometimes by paying an internal staff of developers called a studio. A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual that creates Video games A developer may specialize in a certain video The large video game publishers also distribute the games they publish, while some smaller publishers instead hire distribution companies (or larger video game publishers) to distribute the games they publish. Distribution (or place) is one of the four elements of Marketing mix. Other functions usually performed by the publisher include deciding on and paying for any license that the game may utilize; paying for localization; layout, printing, and possibly the writing of the user manual; and the creation of graphic design elements such as the box design. The verb license or grant license means to give permission The noun license is the document demonstrating that permission In Computing, Internationalization and localization (also spelled internationalisation and localisation, see spelling differences) are means of adapting Large publishers may also attempt to boost efficiency across all internal and external development teams by providing services such as sound design and code packages for commonly needed functionality. For the album by The Jam see Sound Affects. Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced Sounds
Because the publisher usually finances development, it usually tries to manage development risk with a staff of producers or project managers to monitor the progress of the developer, critique ongoing development, and assist as necessary. A game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a Video game. Project Management is the discipline of planning organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives Most video games created by an external video game developer are paid for with periodic advances on royalties. These advances are paid when the developer reaches certain stages of development, called milestones. Within the framework of Project management, a milestone is the end of a stage that marks the completion of a work package or phase typically marked by a high level event such
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Business risks
As businesses go, video game publishing is associated with high risk:
- The Christmas selling season accounts for about half of the industry's yearly sales of video and computer games, leading to a concentrated glut of high-quality competition every year in every game category, all in the fourth quarter of the year. Risk is a Concept that denotes the precise probability of specific eventualities
- Product slippage is very common due to the uncertain schedules of software development. Most publishers have suffered a "false launch", in which the development staff assures the company that game development will be completed by a certain date, and a marketing launch is planned around that date, including advertising commitments, and then after all the advertising is paid for, the development staff announces that the game will "slip", and will actually be ready several months later than originally intended. In popular usage "marketing" is the promotion of products especially Advertising and Branding However in professional usage the term has a wider meaning of When the game finally appears, the effects among consumers of the marketing launch—excitement and "buzz" over the release of the game and an intent to purchase— have dissipated, and lackluster interest leads to weak sales. An example of this is the PSP version of Spider-Man 3. These problems are compounded if the game is supposed to ship for the Christmas selling season, but actually slips into the subsequent year. Some developers (notably id and Valve) have alleviated this problem by simply saying that a given game will be released "when it's done", only announcing a definite date once the game is released to manufacturing. id Software (ɪd officially is an American computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Valve Corporation is an American video game development company based in Bellevue Washington, USA that was founded in 1996, and made famous A software release is the distribution whether public or private of an initial or new and upgraded version of a Computer software product
- There is a consensus in the industry that it has increasingly become more "hit driven" over the past decade. Consumers buy the game that's best-marketed and of the highest quality, therefore buying fewer other games in that genre. This has led to much larger game development budgets, as every game publisher tries to ensure that its game is #1 in its category.
- Games are becoming more expensive to produce. The "next generation" of consoles, particularly the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, have more advanced graphic ability than previous consoles, but taking advantage of that ability requires a larger team size than games on earlier, simpler consoles. The Xbox 360 is the second Video game console produced by Microsoft, and was developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, and SiS. In order to compete with the best games on these consoles, there are more characters to animate; all characters must be modeled with a higher level of detail; more textures must be created; the entire art pipeline must be made more complex to allow the creation of normal maps and more complex programming code is required to simulate physics in the game world, and to render everything as precisely and quickly as possible. In 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling is the process of developing a mathematical, wireframe representation of any three-dimensional object The art pipeline is a term used to describe the entire process of creating and implementing art for a particular project most commonly associated with the creative process for developing In 3D computer graphics, normal mapping is an application of the technique known as Bump mapping. On this generation of consoles, games commonly require budgets of US$15 million to $20 million. The United States dollar ( sign: $; code: USD) is the unit of Currency of the United States; it has also been Activision's Spider-Man 3, for example, cost US$35 million to develop, not counting the cost of marketing and sales. Spider-Man 3 is a video game loosely based on the ''Spider-Man 3'' film. [1] Every game financed is, then, a large gamble, and pressure to succeed is high.
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- Contrasting with the increased expense of "front-line" AAA console games is the casual game market, in which smaller, simpler games are published for PCs and as downloadable console games. A casual game is a Video game targeted at a mass audience of Casual gamers Casual games can have any type of gameplay and fit in any genre Also, Nintendo's Wii console, though debuting in the same generation as the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, requires a smaller development budget, as innovation on the Wii is centered around the use of the Wii Remote and not around the graphics pipeline. The Wii Remote, sometimes Nicknamed " Wiimote " is the primary controller for Nintendo 's
- When publishing for game consoles, game publishers take on the burden of a great deal of inventory risk. Inventory is a list for goods and Materials, or those goods and materials themselves held available in stock by a Business. All significant console manufacturers since Nintendo with its NES (1985) have monopolized the manufacture of every game made for their console, and have required all publishers to pay a royalty for every game so manufactured. The Nintendo Entertainment System (often abbreviated as NES or simply Nintendo) is an 8-bit Video game console that was released by Copyright is a legal concept enacted by Governments, giving the creator of an original work of authorship Exclusive rights to control its distribution usually for This royalty must be paid at the time of manufacturing, as opposed to royalty payments in almost all other industries, where royalties are paid upon actual sales of the product—and, importantly, are payable for games that did not sell to a consumer. So, if a game publisher orders one million copies of its game, but half of them do not sell, the publisher has already paid the full console manufacturer royalty on one million copies of the game, and has to eat that cost.
Investor interest
Numerous video game publishers are traded publicly on stock markets. A stock market, or (equity market is a private or public market for the trading of company Stock and derivatives of company As a group, they have had mixed performance. At present, Electronic Arts is the only third-party publisher present in the S&P 500 diversified list of large U. The S&P 500 is a Stock market index containing the stocks of 500 Large-Cap Corporations all of which are from the United States. S. corporations.
Hype over video game publisher stocks has been breathless at two points:
- In the early 1990s, the introduction of CD-ROM computer drives caused hype about a multimedia revolution that would bring interactive entertainment to the masses. CD-ROM (an initialism of "Compact Disc Read-Only Memory " is a pre-pressed Compact Disc that contains data accessible to but not writable A hype cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity adoption and business application of specific technologies. Multimedia is media and content that utilizes a combination of different content forms. Several Hollywood movie studios formed "interactive" divisions to profit in this allegedly booming new media. A movie studio (aka film studio) is in the established sense of the term a company that distributes films. Most of these divisions later folded after expensively producing several games that were heavy in "full-motion video" content, but light in the quality of gameplay.
- In the United States, revenue from the sales of video and computer games exceeded revenue from film box-office receipts for the first time in the dot-com days of the late 1990s, when technology companies in general were surrounded by hype. The United States of America —commonly referred to as the A hype cycle is a graphic representation of the maturity adoption and business application of specific technologies. The video game publishers did not, however, experience the same level of rise in stock prices that many dot-com companies saw. This was probably because video game publishing was seen as a more mature industry whose prospects were fairly well understood, as opposed to the typical exciting dot-com business model with unknown but possibly sky-high prospects. While many technology stocks were eventually destroyed in the dot-com crash in the early 2000's, the stock prices of the video game publishers recovered as a group; several of the larger publishers such as E. A. and Take2 achieved historical highs in the mid-2000's. Take-Two Interactive Software Inc ( is an American publisher, developer, and distributor of Video games and video game Peripherals
Selected video game publishers
Below are the top 20 video game publishers, ranked by Game Developer in October 2007, in order of overall score in six factors: annual turnover, number of releases, average review score, quality of producers, reliability of milestone payments and the quality of staff pay and perks. Game Developer magazine is a Monthly trade Periodical for the Video game industry. [2] Note that this is not a ranking by revenue, but of the quality of experience of working with the publishers according to staff, and some video game development companies. A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual that creates Video games A developer may specialize in a certain video 2006 positions have been maintained. Buena Vista Games and NCsoft are new to the list, bumping Codemasters off the list. Codemasters (earlier known as Code Masters and often nicknamed Codies in magazines is one of the longest running British Video game developers
| 2007 Position | Name of Publisher | 2006 Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  Nintendo |
2 |
| 2 |  Electronic Arts |
1 |
| 3 | Activision |
3 |
| 4 |  Ubisoft |
8 |
| 5 | THQ |
7 |
| 6 | Take-Two Interactive |
5 |
| 7 | Sega Sammy Holdings/Sega of America |
10 |
| 8 | Sony Computer Entertainment |
4 |
| 9 | Microsoft Game Studios |
6 |
| 10 |  SCi/Eidos Interactive |
16 |
| 11 | Square Enix |
13 |
| 12 | Namco Bandai |
11 |
| 13 | Vivendi Games |
12 |
| 14 | Capcom |
14 |
| 15 | Konami |
9 |
| 16 |  NCSoft |
15 |
| 17 | Disney Interactive Studios |
18 |
| 18 | Atlus USA |
n/a (new entry) |
| 19 | LucasArts |
17 |
| 20 | Midway Games |
20 |
Notable former publishers
- 3DO (console manufacturer) (defunct)
- Acclaim Entertainment (defunct)
- Accolade (acquired by Atari née Infogrames) (defunct)
- Atari (console manufacturer) (acquired by Infogrames, which then renamed itself Atari)
- Coleco (console manufacturer) (defunct)
- Crystal Dynamics (subsidiary)
- Enix (merged with Squaresoft as Square Enix)
- Epyx
- Gathering of Developers (GOD) (Bought by Take-Two Interactive)
- Gremlin Interactive
- GT Interactive
- Hasbro Interactive (acquired by Infogrames)
- Iguana Entertainment
- Infocom (acquired by Activision)
- Imagic
- Interceptor Micros
- Mattel Electronics (console manufacturer)
- Mattel (computer software)
- Maxis (acquired by Electronic Arts)
- Melbourne House (computer games and books)
- Microprose (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
- Mindscape, Inc.
- MUSE Software
- Origin Systems (acquired by Electronic Arts)
- Penguin Software
- Psygnosis
- Spectrum Holobyte (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
- Square Electronic Arts L.L.C. (Owned by Square and Electronic Arts. is a Multinational corporation headquartered in Kyoto Japan founded on Activision Inc is an American Video game developer and publisher. Ubisoft Entertainment (formerly Ubi Soft) ( is a French computer and Video game publisher and developer with headquarters in THQ Inc ( Toy Headquarters) is a global American developer and publisher of Video games. Take-Two Interactive Software Inc ( is an American publisher, developer, and distributor of Video games and video game Peripherals This article is about the holding company There is a separate article on the Sega brand is a multinational Video game Software and Hardware development company and a former Home computer ( SCEI) is a Japanese Video game company specializing in a variety of areas in the video game industry mostly in Video game consoles and is a full Microsoft Game Studios ( MGS) branded with current logo and moniker in 2002 (formerly the Microsoft Game Division or Microsoft Games) is a Wholly SCi Entertainment Group PLC (originally The Sales Curve and later Sales Curve Interactive) is a United Kingdom Video game publisher. Eidos Interactive is a publisher of video and Computer games with its parent company based in England. is a Japanese video game and publishing company best known for its Console role-playing game franchises which include the Final Fantasy series the Dragon This article is about the holding company and the group of companies it owns Vivendi Games, formerly known as Vivendi Universal Games, is a Worldwide French developer publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment For the original NASA meaning see capsule communicator. is a leading Japanese International developer () is a leading developer and publisher of numerous popular and strong-selling toys Trading cards, Anime, Tokusatsu, Slot machines ncSoft Limited was a software development organisation which developed one of the first suite of web-based financial applications Disney Interactive Studios Inc (initially Walt Disney Computer Software, later Disney Interactive and Buena Vista Games Inc is a Japanese Computer and video game developer and publisher. LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC is an American Video game developer and publisher. Midway Games ( (formerly Midway Manufacturing) is an American Video game publisher. The 3DO Company (formerly THDO on the NASDAQ stock exchange also known as 3DO, was a Video game console developer and third-party game Acclaim Entertainment was an American Video game developer and publisher. Accolade was a Video game developer and publisher of the 1980s and 1990s Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. Infogrames Entertainment SA ( IESA) ( is an international Holding company headquartered in Villeurbanne, Lyon, France. Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. Infogrames Entertainment SA ( IESA) ( is an international Holding company headquartered in Villeurbanne, Lyon, France. Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. Coleco was a company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as " Co nnecticut Le ather Co mpany " Crystal Dynamics is an American Video game developer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The was a company that produced Japanese Video games and Manga. was a Japanese Video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. is a Japanese video game and publishing company best known for its Console role-playing game franchises which include the Final Fantasy series the Dragon Epyx Inc was a Video game developer and publisher in the late 1970s and entire 1980s Gathering of Developers (aka God Games and Gathering) was a Texas-based PC and video games publishing company founded in January 1998 with the mission to bridge the Take-Two Interactive Software Inc ( is an American publisher, developer, and distributor of Video games and video game Peripherals Gremlin Interactive was a British Software house based in Sheffield and working mostly in the Home computer market GT Interactive Software Corporation ( Good Times In 2003 Infogrames Inc Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the large Game and Toy company Infogrames Entertainment SA ( IESA) ( is an international Holding company headquartered in Villeurbanne, Lyon, France. Iguana Entertainment, renamed Acclaim Studios Austin after 1999, was a Video game developer operating from 1991 to 2004 in Infocom was a Software company, based in Cambridge Massachusetts, that produced numerous works of Interactive fiction. Activision Inc is an American Video game developer and publisher. Imagic was a third-party maker of games for the Atari 2600 and other early Video game consoles in the early 1980s Interceptor Micros also known as Interceptor Software (and later as Interceptor Group) was a developer / publisher (mainly of Adventure games Mattel Inc ( is the world's largest Toy importing company based on revenue Mattel Inc ( is the world's largest Toy importing company based on revenue Maxis Software is an American company that was founded as a Video game developer and is now a brand name of Electronic Arts (EA Krome Studios Melbourne, formerly Melbourne House, is a video game development studio owned by Krome Studios and based in Melbourne Australia MicroProse, as a corporation and brand name has been owned by several entities since its original founding by Sid Meier and Bill Stealey in 1982 Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the large Game and Toy company Mindscape is an international software publishing company, previously part of The Learning Company. Muse Software was a software and computer game publisher and developer for the first generation of Home computers They first published for the Origin Systems Inc (sometimes abbreviated as OSI) was a Computer game developer based in Austin Texas that was active from 1983 to Penguin Software was a Video game publisher from Geneva, Illinois that produced graphics software and games for the Apple II, Macintosh Psygnosis was a British Video game developer publisher, perhaps best known for their Lemmings, Wipeout Spectrum HoloByte Inc was a Video game developer and publisher originally based in Alameda California. Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the large Game and Toy company was a Japanese Video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. was a Japanese Video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. Folded back into Square Soft, Inc. and changed to Square Enix, Inc. )
- Strategic Simulations, Inc. ("SSI")
- Technos Japan Corporation (defunct) (assets acquired by Atlus)
- US Gold (acquired by Eidos Interactive)
- Virgin Interactive Entertainment
Some of these publishers went out of business; others were purchased or merged with a larger company, and no longer do business under this name, or they exist in name only as a brand. Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI was a Computer game developer and publisher with over 100 titles to its credit since its founding in 1979 is a defunct Japanese Video game Developer, best known for the Kunio-kun (which includes Renegade, Super Dodge is a Japanese Computer and video game developer and publisher. US Gold Corporation is a Gold exploration company focused on Nevada's Cortez Trend which is home to some of the world's largest gold deposits Eidos Interactive is a publisher of video and Computer games with its parent company based in England. Virgin Interactive was a successful and influential British Video game publisher.
See also
References
- ^ "Activision exec prices PS3 games" from Gamespot
- ^ Wilson, Trevor, Game Developer (CMP Media LLC) 14 (9): 6-16, October 2007, ISSN 1073-922X
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