If he were a developer, he admits that he would not be willing to negotiate with the vast majority of publishers, and that’s a strong statement coming from the head of Hooded Horse.

Gamesradar interviewed Jason “Thor” Hall, the head of Pirate Software, and here is Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse. He is the publisher of Manor Lords, which is essentially a one-man development, and he thinks it wouldn’t be stupid for developers to self-publish games, although it would raise funding issues, because usually the publisher will subsidize the development to some extent, but in return they have to cover the publishing costs…

“If I had a game, I would not sign with 90% of the publishers out there. There are resources you can learn from. Developers, if you’re the kind of person that’s willing to go out there and you’re willing to start reading and learning and thinking about all this marketing stuff and trying your best to do it on your own, you can get yourself to a state where you’re 90% better at it than 90% of the publishers and you’re not going to charge yourself. You’re going to take a lot more care of your game, and in particular, you’re not going to make certain mistakes that I see publishers make a lot, which is when they’re marketing a game, they’re trying to market it as something else that’s not quite the game, but they think fits better into some other popular game. Self-publishing is a good way to go,” Bender said.

This way, developers can cut their costs significantly, and when they self-publish their games, it becomes much more important for them to get a successful product out the door. He says a lot of games fail because they get the wrong deals. The publisher is the first to make money until they break even, and only then do the developers start making money.

So Bender has made a pretty fair statement, and we cannot really argue with him on that.

Source: Gamesradar