Publishing not profitable

[Gopher]

It appears that Publishing was never fixed? it seems impossible on legendary to make any money off it

[Kyouko Tsukino]

What Publishing needs to be profitable:

- Fans. Hundreds of thousands of them, but "millions" would make it better.

- Powerful IPs. At least one IP of rating 3.0 or above should do the trick, but if you have more than one IP above that mark, that's good too.

- Studio rating. Your studio should be at 2.5 or above. If nobody knows you, nobody will buy your games. This is pretty realistic, actually.

- Targeting platforms where your games can actually sell. This should be self-explanatory: You can't sell hundreds of thousands of copies if the platforms the game's released in only have tens of thousands of users.

- Low-cost games of the highest possible quality. Some people think "bigger is always better" but this isn't always the case. If you spend more money in the game than the game can bring back, you'll lose money. Also, "improvements" can quickly turn a profitable game into a waste of money, and are majorly unneeded if you have enough people working at your games. If you need improvements to get your game to 90%+ review rating, you're most likely not using enough people.

- Knowing the right price ranges. The sweet spot for the "sales vs. profit" equation is in the $30-39 range. Go lower, and you'll get more sales per week, but less total profit. Go higher, and you'll get more profit per week, but less total profit. And total profit is what you want to have the most of, as it is what'll keep you around.

In any case, it's not "impossible" but like many things in the game, Legendary requires you to know how they work beforehand, or to learn why they're not working while you try to survive Legendary.

[Gopher]

publishing myself seemed fine. I meant publishing other publishers games. You get publishing offers and I was going to do a publishing play through and it never produced money not once. I ended up just relying on my own games.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

Oh, that.

No, it was never fixed, it was one of many "because some people wants it in the game" things added, and only "balanced" to be profitable in Very Easy, Easy and Medium, at least at a point in the game where profit matters.

[joeball123]

Originally posted by Sweaty Gopher:

publishing myself seemed fine. I meant publishing other publishers games. You get publishing offers and I was going to do a publishing play through and it never produced money not once. I ended up just relying on my own games.

Publishing other studios' games can technically be profitable on Legendary, but you need a game's gross profit to be about twice the guarantee amount before you'll see any profit as the publisher due to the implementation of the 'guarantee' amount as an additional payment on top of rather than an advance payment on the turnover share; making matters worse, guarantee amounts are pretty much just a function of game size rather than of any vaguely-realistic assessment of actual profit potential. As such, the games most likely to be profitable for you as the publisher are small games (i.e. mostly B and maybe B+ in the '90s and '00s; possibly larger games later on) that go out on multiple reasonably large platforms currently on the market. Don't bother with 'retro' games or with anything that's not on platforms that you can recognize just by looking at the icon, and probably don't bother with exclusive titles unless the platform they're on is absolutely massive. Another thing to be aware of when acting as a publisher is that publishing contracts can be retail-only, online-only, or retail and online. Retail-only contracts are fine until very late in the game, but online-only contracts are not usually worth taking until at least the 2010s, if not later.

Also, if you do publish for other studios, it may be worth checking for in-app purchases as these can be available for games you publish for other studios and they are not enabled by default.

I would further comment that subsidiaries are "great" if what you care about is publishing games for other studios and seeing the game's card claiming that it's turning a profit for you, as you do not need to pay a guarantee to publish a game from one of your subsidiaries and you only need to give them a 20% cut of the profits instead of the ~33% cut that you'll usually have to give to independent studios. Whether this is actually profitable is more dubious given the administration costs for subsidiaries, especially on Legendary, but it at least won't show a loss on the sideboard.

[Gopher]

The issue I've found with doing publishing of other games is that they simply do not sell well. No matter the rating, the marketing, etc... it seems to be bugged.

[Kyouko Tsukino]

In Legendary, nothing will sell "well" if you compare it to lower difficulties. Also, it may depend. If you're using mods, they may be changing things around as not everyone sees "balance" the same way, or look for the same level of challenge - which is why Sandbox mode was a step in a good direction - player-controlled difficulty levels are a good thing to have in a game.

Anyhow, subsidiary games sell so-so either way, even with the +50% NPC Games Score setting. I get far better profit off my own games - and don't have to pay a cost worth fifty Legendary employees every month to do so.