The Size Of The Game Industry

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Overview

Unless you are a producer or an executive, you may never even see the contract or terms under which your game is produced. You may not feel the need to understand the royalty structure of the agreement, or the rights assignments for the characters you create. You may want to ignore all the lengthy contract language and business mumbo jumbo and stay focused on what you love—designing games. But if you are going to be a smart, effective, and successful game designer, you might want to think again before dismissing the business side of things so quickly.

Understanding the basic structure of the game industry—the players, the market, and how business deals are structured between publishers and developers—is knowledge that can make you a better designer, especially in a commercial sense. This chapter provides a basic overview of how the game industry works and how deals are structured to produce and publish games. It is not a comprehensive explanation, but it will give you enough understanding to participate intelligently in the deal-making process for your game if you are invited to do so. Even if you are not part of that process, this information will help you to understand the concerns of, and communicate more clearly with, the executives and marketing people working on your game.

Our advice to all game designers is to embrace business knowledge in the same way you would embrace technical knowledge. You may not specialize in either, but understanding how the business aspects of the industry work, and how they affect your designs, will help you be a more effective creative person and a more valuable resource on the team.

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