The Business Arrangement

Almost as soon as Camelot started to be developed, we began to try to interest other companies in publishing it for us. The traditional relationship between developer and publisher is that the developer handles all design and implementation of the game, while the publisher handles business arrangements; distribution, advertising, marketing, and so on. Typically the publisher finances the game and then takes a cut of all profits. For the first year that Camelot was in development, we simply could not interest a company in publishing it, which left us in a financial bind; we couldn't afford to develop Camelot .

We then turned to the only source of revenue available to us: We sold a minority share of Mythic's stock to Abandon Entertainment, a New York-based entertainment company. With this sale of stock, we financed Camelot 's entire development, as well as some of its marketing and advertising. It also paid for a booth at E3.

By the time E3 rolled around, we had two of the three realms done and were well on our way to hashing out the RvR combat system. In fact, our primary focus at the show was to demonstrate our RvR system. By that time ”five months before release ”it was obvious that the game was going to be done on time and that it was good. Publisher interest was heating up, but by that time, we didn't need one ”we had the game financed and produced. What we needed was a distributor, so we used E3 to set up meetings with many large game companies interested in distributing Camelot for us.

One such company, Vivendi Universal, impressed us more than all the others, and we signed up with them to promote and distribute Camelot . Vivendi has a great system of regional sales; through their sales chain, Camelot has been distributed to just about any retail outlet that wants to sell it. Vivendi has been a stable, reliable, and overall a great partner for Mythic.