4: Any Deal Is a Good Deal


#4: Any Deal Is a Good Deal

Getting a publishing deal is a great reason to throw a party, especially if it's the first for your new game development shop. However, your goals extend much farther than that important milestone. Ultimately, you must be concerned with distribution (e.g., how many stores your game gets into), the advance money you will receive to pay for development, the royalty you will get for each copy sold, and how the relationship with this publisher works after the game is released. All of these things are important—they play a part in determining whether you'll still be in business long enough to finish your title and see it succeed.

It's hard to get a publishing deal. It's even harder to get one you can live with. Be careful about selling yourself short, about capitulating to any terms for the sake of getting a deal. Sometimes, no deal is better than a bad deal.

Think long and hard about the terms you need in a deal in order to survive. For example, it hurts you (and it hurts the publisher) to sign a deal with an advance so low that you go bankrupt before you complete the game. You can also doom yourself by setting your schedule too short, your scope too large, or by giving the publisher too much control over your company's future. You need to recognize your goals and your situation and bring those to the negotiating table to craft out a contract that won't kill you.

A basic negotiating skill is to identify your BATNA: Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement. In other words, it's the alternative you have if you can't come to an agreement during the negotiation. For example, depending on your situation and how many publishers you've talked to, your BATNA might be to self-publish your game, or to go with another publisher's less-appealing (but still profitable) terms.

You should also know at what point a publisher's terms become worse than your BATNA. This is the point at which you abandon negotiations—you thank the publisher for their time, get up, and leave the room.

If you don't know your BATNA before you enter negotiations, you might very well come out of negotiations with a contract that's so horrible that it's worse than having no contract at all. Be careful.




Secrets of the Game Business
Secrets of the Game Business (Game Development Series)
ISBN: 1584502827
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 275

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