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It has always been a somewhat complicated issue following the ins and outs of just how the Game Industry functions and what certain jobs on it mean. Today I'd like to take a moment to help out a bit and give a little insight into how the game industry tends to be organized. This editorial comes courtesy of watcher over in the forums, who suggested that someone should take the time and provide a nice clear explanation of what's the difference between developers and publishers.
In fairness, it is kind of confusing. The game industry is not an old industry, being all of about thirty-five years old by the earliest games. It has grown very quickly, but a lot of different methods on how to produce games have also come about during this growth, a lot of different philosophies on what works and what doesn't. The information in this editorial is largely courtesy of Ernest Adams, a famous game developer and writer of 'Break into the Game Industry: How to get a job making video games." He's also a great speaker, and I urge any of you who get the chance to meet with him to take the opportunity. Additionally, if you want more depth on the subject, I highly suggest the book, which goes into far greater detail then I am going into here.
In the game industry, there tends to be two big names that get bandied about. One is the developer, the folks who make the game. The other is the publisher, the folks who fund the game. It often gets pretty difficult to make out the differences between these two groups and figure out who does what and how. It becomes worse when you have to consider that there really tends to be three real configurations on how things go: In-house, out-of-house, and partnership. The only thing that tends to remain the same between these three is that the publisher is the one who wears the pants in the relationship. They provide the money necessary to develop the game; they fund the marketing and production of it; and without them the whole business really wouldn't function. It takes a lot of money for a company to be a publisher. It's a rare development house that grows to the size of being able to fund publishing its own games directly.
That said, what about those three configurations I mentioned? In-house development is where the publishing company and the development company are one and the same. The most famous, to us, example of this is Square soft, which has a long tradition of developing their games in-house, alongside also using their wealth to help smaller development companies produce their own games, publishing them under the Square Soft brand name and often bringing them overseas to America and Europe. Out-of-house means that the publishing company develops the idea, organizes it, provides the funds for it, and hires external companies to develop it, ranging from the full development to little more than a coding house. Enix, historically, always outsourced to other development houses, overseeing the design of the games but not internally developing them. This tends to be quite an investment on the side of the publisher and a far greater risk than developing in-house, where everything can more closely be watched over by the folks paying the bills.
Finally, there is the configuration that confuses most everyone, the partnership. In this case, a development company contacts the publishing company and presents before them a game idea, some prototyping, and whatever else they have in an attempt to sell the game design to the publisher. If the publisher bites onto the hook, they enter into a partnership in which the developer tends to live from milestone to milestone getting the necessary funds to continue development from the publisher. The developer gets the creative freedom, provides the work, and produces the game. The publisher makes sure it sells, providing the funding and, if the sales merit it and the publisher is large enough, often the foreign localization. That isn't to say that developers don't sometimes get another publisher when they make the leap over to the States, but that usually the decision to expand where the game is sold to another country is made at the publisher level and not the developer.
I hope that clears it up a bit for those confused over how it worked.
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