Changing Role of the Publisher | Dan PRIGG, Paul THELEN, Vlad SUGLOBOV, Kyu LEE, Jeff HILBERT

Kicking off the afternoon of the general industry, we're gonna do one of our very few 60-minute sessions. So as over the course of the last couple years, we've been moving towards shorter and shorter lecture sessions, mainly because you, our audience, have told us that you would like to hear shorter sessions and more of them. But when we have a panel, we have a large topic such as publishing that we want to get a bunch of different perspectives on, we often will organize an hour-long session with a number of panelists, and that's what this is. So with the advent of app stores and the rise in popularity of app stores as a distribution mechanism and free-to-play games as a rising in popularity form of monetization and mechanic from monetization games, one of the things that has dramatically changed in the game business is the role of what publishers are. Game publishers had remained unchanged largely for a pretty long period of time going back into the late 80s and early 90s. Even with the start of digital distribution and casual games, the role of the publisher didn't change very much. But we've had a real struggle over the last couple of years with the change in power structure between developers and publishers. No longer was it possible for a publisher to pay a developer to build something over nine months and then never talk to them again because you have this ongoing commitment that you have to make to these service-based games. So as part of an ongoing effort to try to quantify and re-quantify the roles of publishers in the industry, Jeff Gilbert from DDM agreed to put together a panel of publishers to talk about the changing roles of publishers in the industry. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jeff, and he can introduce this panel and his panelists.

Thanks for the introduction. Just so you know, we'd like to get a lot of questions from the audience about things that you guys want to know directly. So I have a few questions prepared, but if you guys have any direct questions, feel free to jump in. So the way I'd like to do this: I'm gonna introduce the panelists, they're gonna tell you about their company, what they feel they do as a publisher, and roughly if you were to submit a product to them, what they look for and what you guys can expect in return. Just a quick background on me: I owned DDM, it's an agency we represent video game development studios, so we work with a lot of the publishers and we see all of different models. So we do everything from self-publishing to distribution; we have offices all over, so we just work with a lot of different publishers. So we have a different perspective. I'm gonna start with Paul from Big Fish because he's in the middle.

So I'm Paul from Big Fish Games. I've been in this industry a very, very long time, I'm very, very old. Big Fish has evolved over the last 11 and a half years. We started as a studio and morphed into a publishing and distribution company around premium casual games, games you buy, and now are expanding that kind of competency in our customer reach and everything we do and our producers into free-to-play, focused on more breadth than we were in premium. That premium became kind of a one-trick pony, one type of genre. With free-to-play, each game is a P&L, and so we are looking to expand pretty broadly what the definition of casual means for us. Okay.

Hi from Gainesville. I'm Kuli, president of Gainesville USA. King Ville is a publicly listed company in South Korea; we have branch offices in the US, Japan, and China. We've been actively working with a lot of developers around the world, I think the count was around 70, and we've been doing mobile games since the year 2000. We strongly emphasize the operation role of the publisher, and we could also help a lot on the distribution side. Okay.

Okay, and then Dan from Spil Games.

Dan Break from Spil Games. I've been there about six months, and prior to that I was at Unity and GameStop, and a long time ago working with Paul at Real Networks, GameHouse. At Spil Games, we're focused on advertising through in-gaming and whatnot, and we do a lot of web games. We've got about 180 million monthly users across all of our networks, as we're fairly global and been around quite a while. I think for us, the long-term view is in terms of the free-to-play model is to focus more on the advertisement aspect of it as an additional and newer opportunity for a lot of developers out there.

What kind of split are you seeing in advertising versus paid? What kind of revenue split are you starting to see?

I mean we're totally advertising based, so totally there's totally out. We don't do any kind of premium or subscription base; it's completely off the advertisers. We're seeing a big growth in video in terms of eCPMs and why not, and so it's definitely driving a lot more. And I think for us it plays better into the free-to-play model as consumers are used to the free content, and so we're simply just monetizing it like you would in TV in terms of that model.

And if you can answer this, what could somebody expect in revenue from your company if they brought a game to you? Roughly how is the deal with you guys structured?

For us, it's more about a longer kind of revenue stream, so you won't see a big free-to-play model in terms of millions up for a particular game, but you might see a nice monthly income in the thousands. And then again, these games are developed in a much shorter timeframe, so you're spending 30 days to 3 months to make a web game, and you can build five or six web games that are incremental stacked on top of each other that can support studios for four years. So we're seeing good 12 to 24 four-month monetization because people just play, and we monetize that way. Okay.

And then as far as mobile goes, this is the big question that we always have with all the developers: if I can self-publish on the app store, why do I need a publisher? What do you guys feel is your key strengths that you bring to the table?

Oh well, I totally disagree. I might repeat exactly what he said, but I have no idea. The role of the publisher is there's many aspects, and it really depends on the developer and what type of game. We get involved in everything from the creative side on the GDD forward. We see a lot of games go through our systems, we know what customers are demanding and what is kind of waning as far as popularity in games and genres. I would also say that self-publishing is great, and the three people that find your game will enjoy it. Apple for example launches up to a thousand apps a day on peak days now, and Apple's great at promoting a couple games a week, but that's about it. What we do is we try to understand what our customers are asking for and make sure we are working with developers to bring them the types of games that they want. So when we launch, we can get very broad distribution and discovery. So it comes down to collaboration on the build process, discovery of the apps, and then we assign data analysts and producers throughout the iteration process and the months to come to help the developer tune the game to achieve what we're trying to do with the game in the market. And when appropriate, we have a very large checkbook to promote the game if that's appropriate for the game.

As far as promoting the game, how do you guys go about promoting it? What are some best campaigns that you use?

Well we have ten years of building an audience for casual, and much of that audience is now cross-platform. So we have a tremendous organic reach where we can actually push a game into the top 20 free titles. And if the game warrants it, we can augment that without spending and push it into the top 10. For key game launches, we can push the game into the number one free spot. That is on the distribution side, and that's very important initially to get discovered for data. But also on an ongoing basis, as you improve the game, you want new people coming in to give you more data on how the game has improved or has not, to continue making weekly improvements until the game is a success, or both the publisher and the developer jointly decide that it's time to move on to a different game, which is the case in a hit driven industry. Okay.

Okay, so you provide ongoing support as well with analytics and things like that?

For us, we have a slightly different angle. Of course, we have a large user base of about 300 million users, but I don't think it's really the distribution that the developers need because you could always buy traffic if you have the money, and there's a lot of good ad aggregators out there too. So it's not like you have to work with 200 channels to advertise your game; you could just simply use those mediation layers. I think the biggest difference is in the past, when you were launching games on the App Store, most of them were looked at as a product. Now I feel like all the successful games are more like a live service. So I think that concept is missing from most of the developers that I talk to, and the live operation part is the biggest part that we emphasize. We hired a lot of former online PC people who worked for bigger online PC gaming companies, and they bring in about ten years of live operations experience on the PC, and those same rules are being adopted to the mobile space. And I think yes, we helped developers get featured in the past, and we thought that was our role, but now I think the role has changed to providing live operation services for the developers that we work with.

Okay, we're actually doing some deals with them, so we're seeing that. No, it's been pretty good. A lot of publishers say they're gonna provide support, you guys have been good so far. Dan?

Yeah, I think, you know, I've been in this industry a long time, I've watched the evolution of a traditional publisher. I think for the first time, we're seeing more independent studios than actual traditional publishers than ever before. So I think the traditional role of a publisher has to evolve in terms of a long-term partnership. So I think philosophically, what you want to look for in a publisher is someone who has the things that you don't have as a small independent developer. Part of that's reach, part of that's marketing, but part of it is also understanding what you as a small developer are capable of, and where you fit in the marketplace right now. As Paul said, there's so much content out there, it's gonna be more about those partnerships with the publisher that make more sense, and you're gonna see a lot more of that in the future. Even us players up here, we are looking for partnerships with the big and small because we recognize that this pond is huge. We're competing not only with games but with Netflix and ebooks and all the technology, and you have one consumer with a limited amount of time. So looking at your brand itself and asking if there are other things we can do than pure distribution, and looking at your game as a service and saying we're in this for the long haul. When you guys look for publishers, these are legitimate questions you should be asking and demanding from the people you work with in terms of that partnership.

Just by a show of hands, how many people in here have self-published their own titles? A few. How many people have worked with publishers to publish a title? About the same amount. That's a good mix. You know, one of the things we always look for in a publisher, and you guys nailed it: yes, you want distribution, yes you want users, but it's the analytics and the analysis before we go live that's one of the biggest things we see. As a developer, you get too close to the game and you and your friends all like it and play it, but then all of a sudden you bring it to a publisher and a fresh set of eyes come on it. The coaching that we get even before we go into beta, just moving little things, that's probably some of the most valuable stuff that we end up seeing besides the money and the distribution. Don't get me wrong, we appreciate all that. Which is my next question: during beta phase, assuming you have the game, what kind of feedback do you provide to the developer?

Sure, I actually didn't understand that time, but we provide a lot of the same services. I mean, a beta release means it's an introduction to an audience, and the audience votes with their usage and with their money. We generally do weekly cohort analysis, where every week we change features, tweak things, and do A/B testing. We spend anywhere from one to six months in beta until we go for a worldwide launch, and we've done that with a number of products very successfully. We also provide, even before beta, alpha testing with live consumers, where we do either split-screen or quad screens, and we provide video feedback to the developers regardless of where they live of actual consumers of that game prior to launch. So when we launch into live production, you have a good feel for the mechanic, and then the live production is more about the economics and the tuning of the flow, not the mechanic. By the time we launch, we want the mechanic to be good.

We pretty much do the same thing. We really focus on the monetization of the games. So our producers will send out a presentation file with all the details on what has to be fixed and also a list of things they'd like to have before launch. Another important thing that a lot of developers miss is they don't really prepare for the live service after the game launch. So we make sure that all of those tools are ready before the launch. We also do closed beta testing with our users to make sure that everything is stable on the monetization front and on the server front. We do a lot of stress testing on the builds to see if we could have enough users on their servers. Okay.

Yeah, we do something totally different. I mean, for us, we're a little bit more web-focused, so obviously our production cycles are much smaller than the big free-to-play models or the premium models. For us, as we say, we use live bullets, so when you launch a web game, you're pretty much live and out there. We're much more interested in monetization for the advertisements themselves. So we look for the proper usage of when to put ads, and we have the data and analytics to say that this actually helps your gameplay or improves time played, which is probably our most important metric. So we're very much more focused on the consumer experience and training in that way. Data is super critical for us, we couldn't function without it. One thing I will add is that we have a number of developers that build for Windows or PC first, even before mobile. The downside of mobile is the submission process is very lengthy, especially on iOS. With our PC production, we can do daily iterations if needed, if the developer can keep up, and get feedback on a much faster cycle. That can tighten the beta period from several months of waiting in the submission process to a much shorter time frame, and get the product tuned much faster on PC, then take it to iOS or Android. We also do a lot of testing on Android first because you can do daily or multiple submissions in the same day. So sometimes it becomes more handy, even though you're launching on iOS first, doing testing on Android too.

So some direct questions. A lot of developers need money to finish their game. How do financial structures work? Number one, how do financial structures work assuming you want the game, and where does the game normally need to be for you guys to pick it up? In other words, license fee, advance against royalty, what type of royalty could they expect, and when do you normally have to see the game for you guys to approve it? Let's assume you want the game, and even if you provide a range, that would be great.

It's almost an impossible question to ask, not because of the sensitive nature, but simply because it depends on the partner. We have partners we've worked with for eight years, and the type of deal we strike with a partner we trust and have brought multiple games to market with looks very different than a first-time developer we've never worked with. We'll be more conservative and careful. So it's not that I'm evading the question; it really depends on the type of content, whether premium or free-to-play, our confidence in the size of the market, and the developer. There is no real easy way to answer. A general goal is that if a partner needs funding, we fund them to break-even and then give them a healthy royalty so their incentive is to make a great game. There is funding available for the right game. If we have a partner we know and trust, we will fund it to break-even for the developer, and then we're both relying on the success of that game. We support the live team at break-even until revenue catches up. There is no such thing as free-to-play that isn't a live service. In premium, they launch and walk away; in free-to-play, the effort really starts after launching the game. We pay royalties from dollar one, no matter what the game costs us. They make money from month one to four, and as the game scales, additional royalties come in.

And once again, I know this is a hard question. For a new developer who you haven't met before, and they submit to you, where do you want that developer to be, where do you want that game to be before you evaluate it? What's the minimum? I mean, pictures are easy. If it's a developer we've worked with for years, a few clever screenshots and a thesis is enough. For a developer we've never worked with, we'd want a very fully playable five to thirty minute game build before we'd have confidence moving forward.

We take a similar approach. Usually it's a 50/50 split because the publishing business is really a low margin business if you think about it. There are a lot of people involved post-launch: producers, associate producers, community managers, customer support, QA. There are a lot of roles the publisher has to take, so I think a 50/50 is a fair agreement between the developer and the publisher. We typically want to do minimum guarantees. We have deals that have been up to a million dollars in terms of minimum guarantees, but most deals are sub-$500k. If a deal goes over a million, we'll sometimes look into equity investment into the companies, but we typically want to do that after having a relationship of a couple of games. Okay.

Okay, so you guys tap out at about a million, so don't come to you with something but really five hundred thousand.

Yeah, there's not a lot of developers who ask for more than a million. If there is, they have a good reason for it, so we'll look at all the deals, but I don't think that's in our comfort zone. In the mobile space, the comfort zone seems to be 250 to 500 for midcore, hardcore. For casual games, we're seeing 50 to 100 as the max. That's what we see as the range. With you guys, it starts there and depends on confidence in the scope of the game. If you're making a very complex multiplayer game, it's gonna be a bigger budget. If you're doing something blue ocean that's never been done before, it's gonna be a bigger budget. But that seems to be the sweet spot. If you're in that range, you're pretty comfortable. If you get above it, you better have a really good reason.

We'll just talk about product, of course, hope turns out. That's a great answer and also to when I was talking about the 50/50 k that's more for super casual game the more complex the more complex the more mid core we see starting to creep above a million but when a developer walks in with a mobile game at that rate it better you better be a proven developer that's done had a hit in the past and it better be something special I mean we have we have you know for the right opportunity we will spend quite a bit I mean it has to be the right opportunity has to be a proven development team yeah we have a very large project underway with a very large development team with a long 15 year track record of making hit games and we're only funding half the game and it's two million dollars so we do do big-budget games but we do a lot of smaller casual games as well because you don't know where the next hit will come from but I think that's one of the key takeaways from that it's a proven group that they work with I think there's a lot of startup teams in here or there at least the teams that would be new to working with you guys so one of the key things is I think we need a playable you have to have a really really strong playable especially if you're asking for for money

dan I'm not in the premium space anymore I mean our focus is obviously on much smaller web games you know and for us you know we're paying for a lot of work for hire stuff some licensing fees you know I think our model is more about you know we want smaller web games but we're willing to fund you know 10 to 12 of these in a given year so for us that's more of the you know going live for with a with the publisher if that makes sense for you for you guys as opposed to that does

does anyone have any questions that they want to ask her up that was fast

thank you I'm Sasha I have a small team of developers and my biggest pain sits right here his name is Alex he's my head of game design I'm trying to work with some publisher and my team says who the hell are they to tell us what to do they're very jealous they have a vision they have a project it's like their baby and Alex here says I'm not gonna do I'm not going to change my game design whatever those people say he doesn't care how experienced you are how many successful projects you have what do I do with him what do we do when the team is jealous of publishers when they do not accept the help you offer thank you

oh you know we're always willing to take risks with people with strong beliefs it's just that the economic risk is shift more on the developer if they're not willing to take the advice that we provide so it really depends on if you're asking for a lot of money and you're not listening that's not a relationship that will work out if you're looking at a publisher for the other things a publisher brings the table and you have your idea and your funding the game you have a lot more liberties to do what you want and you take the risk so it really depends on your risk appetite III even think though even if you completely fund it and you don't listen to the publisher they're just not going to support you because they're gonna run you remember most publishers are analytics driven it doesn't matter what a genius they are if the market doesn't want it the markets gonna tell them really fast it could be the best idea in the world and the market just doesn't care so you need you have to listen to your publisher or don't use them but to be fair there's you know in games that you buy there's a lot of known I'll call it prescriptive ways to make a successful game free to play every time you think you ever figured out someone else comes to market with some brand new concept that's a hit yeah and so that's why I say it depends on your risk profile if you want to take a risk we're willing to partner with people who are smart and I think they know what the next big thing is we're just less likely to put as much money at risk with that partner I had someone say the best thing to me about free-to-play there is absolutely one car free-to-play market but work six months ago won't work now that is the only constant in the free-to-play it's constantly changing

yeah I think the developer and publisher relationship is a lot like a marriage in some ways - and you have to have have a lot of respect and also willingness to change and especially it's not something that you're just going to produce a baby and then you're gonna get divorce it you're gonna have to live with them forever and you're gonna have to raise that baby and you'll you'll have you you'll get into fights you're totally ruining this for me yeah so yeah I we fight a lot with the with the developers and I think if if you're if you're if you're doing a service you you can't expect the the game to be the same like all the games that we run as a service it's totally a different game today compared to where it was a year ago yeah I think you know it's tough you're gonna have creative people who are extremely passionate about what they believe is gonna do well you also have publishers you know and again our experience is based off of analytics it's based off you know almost decades know of monetization experience so you know if anything you know as I tell my producers you know make mistakes and make them quick and don't make them again so we highly encourage you know to try new stuff because that's the only way you're really going to have a super breakout hit but at the end of the day I also remind them if you really really screw up I want to remind you for the rest of your life so you know be cognizant of that and again this is this is an ongoing process so there's multiple points you know from alpha to concept to beta to second beta third beta where you're getting tons of data and at some point you know if your team isn't listening to that you really have to kind of you know evaluate your team in terms of you know is this the right fit it's because the publisher will be doing the same because they don't want to waste their time you know they want to have successful studios they want to have successful relationships you know I'm not gonna say it's a marriage because I'm a fear of commitment as it is so but I think it's super important for both sides to be willing to to commit to that and part of that's my listening so

yeah and Paul brought up a really good point too I mean the reason these guys are here is to find that new thing that's why I mean probably everyone on this panel isn't here to see oh it's like Angry Birds oh it's like clash of kinds no one's here to find that game they're here to find the new and innovative game but that said they know the market in it could be who said about just simply monetizing like helping I'm on it what do you guys said something about just hopping on monetization there are certain things that everything is a guess it is a service the games gonna keep on evolving we all agree with that but there's certain things that they know that can shorten that cycle down you know normally this works this doesn't and you know but sometimes what doesn't work works for a different game it's just a balance I think a listening to the publisher um does anyone else have a question

I have one so I want to shift the conversation away from what happens before lunch to what happens after lunch because that's where I get skeptical actually about the developer/publisher relationship and specifically when you're dealing with a game service you're dealing with a very tightly coupled loop between marketing and product development so you've got lots of engagement marketing that's going out to your existing community you've got lots of game updates that are coming out and content updates coming out and keeping those those that community that outbound communication to your users in sync with what's going on in your game it's really hard even in one organization so can you guys talk a little bit about how you connect your marketing efforts in your community development efforts with what's happening on a game across all of the different games that you publish

I mean when you launch a game the more eyes that are on the data coming in the better and we try and be completely transparent with as new customers come in and the performance and we have a standard set of metrics and we allow the game developer to access them in real time we can provide a dashboard we have our own analysts interpreting what's going on but we also look to the developer to develop that expertise over time to understand their own game in their own metrics and I think that's a good combination when you have two or more perspectives on the same set of data and coming to conclusions on what is working what is not each game has its own strengths and weaknesses and really focusing on that with both the developer hat on and with as well as the business and marketing hat on is is a good combination one thing that we think we do a little bit differently is on the marketing budget we actually deduct it from the net revenue and then we split the net revenue with the developer so marketing doesn't come out of only our part pocket it comes out from the developers pocket together of course there we always get approval from the developer if we if we can spend it or not so it's it's kind of a joint process in the in the decision making and we've seen a lot of cases where publishers will have a fixed marketing budget and once they run out of it they stop pushing it and we didn't want to run into those steps so we actually we we make it an ongoing process even on the marketing budget

okay yeah I think you know a lot of good points that are brought up here I think you know for you as the developer that I think the most important thing is when you're looking for a publisher when you're signing up with a publisher is to ask about kind of that you know deployment roadmap both you the publisher and the developer should actually have a strategy if you're especially in the free-to-play market saying yes we're launching it but then what's the actual support roadmap for that six months down the road so you as an independent are you gonna be supplying and and then the publisher should be looking at in terms of their marketing plan so I mean both of you guys should be looking at this as a service which I think you know you're starting to see a lot of those as the publishers but I think also the Indians need to start you know taking the into accountability before you sign up with anything saying recognizing that the launch is only the middle points of your game and kind of saying well you have to think about the beginning the middle and the end as a developer and publisher

so we kind of got ahead of ourselves on the rest of the questions here does anyone else have a question or does anyone have a particular product

just playable with with our existing developers that we work with for a number of years I would say the majority of games that we sign with them are at the design concept where there is no playable with a developer we haven't worked with before zero percent or the design phase it has to be at a playable phase the the developers some of developers we've been working with as long as seven eight years and we have a lot of trust and understanding and their ability to pull off a game based on a design alone and will sign games at that level but if we've never worked with the developer papers easy to put together fun games are hard so we'd want to see a full playable yet it's pretty pretty much similar for our existing partners or partners who have a good track record we could we're pretty comfortable signing just with the design document but you know when it comes to new new developers it's pretty much a playable that that we need but there's a lot of competition going on between the publishers these days so as a publisher we're feeling more pressure to sign in earlier stages and I think as a developer you have plenty of options out in the market so building up to the playable wouldn't be a big risk for you is what I would say to

hi my name is Shannon Gallagher and I'm an intellectual property attorney I wanted to ask the panel if you could tell me I've worked with different developers in the past and they bring me things and they're looking for trademark protection or someone else is looking at what they've been doing and there's intellectual property problems so when when in the development do you advise that the developers or that you look at the IP and trademark issues

I mean as a publisher we take on that liability our contracts do make the developer does indemnify us but most developers don't have the backing to back up that indemnity and so we do take on that responsibility where we live in the US which is a fairly little Society that said the game space there's not that many examples of successful you know definitely not patent enforcement on the trademark side there's that's pretty much more easy search to do and we do often do that whether it's the title of the game or other kind of copyrighted art forms but it's really in the game space you know every game is a derivative of another game and so from the patent side we don't worry about it that much we do worry about it on a on an infringing on a title or infringing on a piece of art that answers your question we take on that responsibility but we haven't had a lot of a lot of issues with it in the past really

yeah I mean it's from a development point of view I would do it as soon as you come up with a name just because it's I've done enough of these games over the years where you know you have a concept you love the title you're love with the title you're in love with the character you created Alton you know Disney created this you know 50 years ago and you're just like damn it you know and and then it kind of it can actually mess up your entire development cycle so I think you know you can always start at the very beginning when you're in design phase which I kind of recommend just to do that at least the research to understand you know at least what kind of challenges you might run into even from a search or even from a something that might be too similar to it because what the last thing you want to do is work with a publisher launch your game and then have a nice big fat email from some you know lawyer group letting you know that you have a cease-and-desist and all kinds of fun stuff and so yeah we're identified but it ruins your game you know we you can launch this game and under this title and if you all send after a week you have to take it down because of the name you know I've seen that just kill Studios completely

so there's another question yes thank you

I have one question concerning the free-to-play or premium casual oh hello okay hey one question concerning free-to-play or premium content because I am the new developer and I'm thinking what to do next so I think maybe it's a good question for because you are here and we all in previously lecture which we hear that it's me to play something that will happen in future that's a good model I saw the poll lecturer it was really good and showed that the numbers are good and correct but what I am concerned as a developer is the relationship between costs and income for free-to-play games because we saw that your game found and big fish casino you have to spend a lot of money for every day every month for that game to be living game so I am just quite my question is a free-to-play game are they good choice for the new open studio thank you

well it depends on if you want to have a small chance or no chance of being successful weird we are the largest publisher of premium games in the world and we don't need more developers if you were to develop a game for premium and launch it it will be very difficult for you to earn any money or a positive return on the effort to build that game today the world has changed free-to-play unfortunately as well as they hit driven industry but better to partner so on we have a chance at a hit then not have any chance of a viable return at all and so when you when you if you're an independent developer you should make sure you resource yourself to miss a few times if you're betting everything on one title that's extremely risky like I said it is a hip driven industry and last time I checked I said this in my keynote there's only ten games top ten and that'll never change and so it's a hard question to answer it's you know five years ago I'd have a very different answer there was a huge amount of room for small developers to build indie developers or independent developers or just casual game developers to build a premium title and have a decent return it's not going to be a hit it's not going to make you millions of dollars off of one title but you'd have a nice return on that with free-to-play it's much more of a hits driven industry and the risks are greater but so are the rewards you don't I can't think of a casual premium game that has made as much in its lifetime as candy crush does in a week and so free-to-play is exciting because the opportunity is much bigger but it is riskier and so it's something you as a developer need to kind of wrap your arms around and say what is your risk profile and do you have the resources for a few misses

we have one more minute if you want to jump in

we only do free to play we don't look at premium we only work with company nowadays we only work with companies that have sizable teams too so if if you're indie developer I think you should look for other routes and but if you're looking for a publisher I think we have a bigger goal that we want to achieve together and I think we probably want you to have a team of at least five people

I just know that really if you have a pay-to-play game the only market that still likes to South America a lot of publishers won't even look at pay to play game but you said it best make the game you want to make don't build a business model build a game and lo and behold if it's a great game people will find it and you might start with lower lower cost games for like spiel where the risks are lower where you can afford to fail and learn before you build a big bet that smart

hey guys we need to wrap I can you guys be available for questions out in the hallway because we have to get out of this room sure sure okay guys they'll be out in the hallway we can't stay in this room the next concert needs to come in thank you everyone thank you publishers thank you Jeff