Savage 2 Selling Online-Only
Gamedaily has a very interesting interview with Marc DeForest, co-founder and lead designer at S2 games. They've decided to self-publish Savage 2 and sell it directly from their website for $29.99. That means they don't have to deal with all the control issues (both creative and business-wise) that publishers introduce.
Most interesting is that even though Savage 1 sold only 20% of it's copies online (compared to 80% at traditional retail), S2 made more money from the online sales! Wow!
Mini-marketing 101 lesson. The "4Ps" of marketing are Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The "Place" refers to the channel of distrubution used to sell the product. Usually, a game publisher takes a very large cut in exchange for providing services such as funding, getting the game on retail shelves, testing, and promotion.
In S2's case, it sounds like they are able to fund themselves. They are better able to create a good Product without a publisher (rather than worse able). They are able to offer the product at a lower Price by cutting out some of the channels of distribution. They are doing Promotion themselves. The only question here is the "Place," and Savage 1 showed them where the money is.
With online distribution, one of the main benefits of the traditional game publisher starts to fade. In 5 years, what will the role of a traditional game publisher be? In 10 years? In 50?
--Sirlin
March 14th, 2006 at 3:42 am
I see game publishers like real estate agents. In the housing markets, you’re seeing more and more private sales and aided private sales (http://www.comfree.ca/). The publisher is the middleman… and I’ve never heard of any one wanting a middleman in any process.
In the future, I believe the publisher will be replaced with a web page and pricing for games will be both profitable and competitive (imagine that). Also, the Internet allows for something that I’ve hated from day one with retail games… availability. Games seem to have an average shelf life of 6 to 12 months or so and that is absurd to me.
I don’t want to pay full-price for a game that is fun, but isn’t worth $50 and I don’t want to buy some kid’s used drink coaster from a store that tells me, despite the sticky cola residue, the game plays perfectly.
If it means that games will have an infinite shelf life and potentially be cheaper for me to purchase… sign me up for this downloading thing you kids call the interweb. ;-)