How digital publishing is shaping the future of the game industry_September 30, 2013 | By Christian Nutt

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/201286/How_digital_publishing_is_shaping_the_future_of_the_game_industry.php

To kick off Gamasutra's themed week on Digital Publishing, Christian Nutt writes about the trends that are shaping the space -- and what developers should consider when making decisions about how they publish their games. Stay tuned for more articles and blogs.

We knew it would come to this. Developers have been directly selling games to players for decades; a business selling "shareware" via local, dial-up BBSes in the early 1990s eventually grew into Epic Games.

But back in the 1990s, Epic felt it needed to turn to traditional publishers to realize the full potential of its Unreal series. While the potential for directly selling games to consumers was obvious even then, the pieces weren't all there to do it cheaply and reliably while reaching a broad audience.

They are now. Digital publishing is here.

That's not to say there aren't problems -- we're familiar all of them. If you're on PC, chances are you want to be on Steam, and that's still a hurdle for many developers. On the mobile app stores, where anyone can release a game… anyone does. There's a huge fight for visibility, and competition is brutal. Before that, even, there's getting funded. Then there's dealing with the headaches of business, legal, marketing, PR, testing, localization -- all of the stuff publishers once did for developers.

And players are no less demanding than they were in the past.

Still, it's obvious as of this writing that fundamental changes are coming to publishing. Just months after it became necessary to write this editorial on why Microsoft needed to enable self-publishing on the Xbox One, it became the last of the three console manufacturers to launch a program to allow developers to go direct-to-player on its platform, following in the footsteps of Nintendo and Sony.

The question is no longer one of "if" -- self-publishing is here. Now, developers must be concerned with "how," "where," and "why or why not." As it turns out, possibilities bring decisions to make. And while the game industry can only benefit from creators free to do what they want... it turns out it's not that easy to figure out what it is that you want, after all, when you're not sure what you should do.

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