How To Find A Game Publisher For Your Indie Game

Developing an Indie Game can be an expensive task and one of the ways you can help with that financial burden is finding a Game Publisher to help. This guide is going to cover all the ways you can find a Game Publisher for your game, the benefits of having a Game Publisher and how likely it is to convince one.

• What does a Game Publisher do for Indie Games?
• How To Find A Game Publishers
• What You Need To Get Signed By A Game Publisher
• List Of Indie Game Publishers
• Recommend An Indie Game Publisher

As part of our new Game Development section, we want to try and offer some more resources for Indie Game Development and one important aspect of that is Game Publishers.

Not everyone needs a Game Publisher, but if you're looking to get the backing of a studio to help publish your game, work on marketing and give you advice for your game development, having a Game Publisher can be vital for your success.

What does a Game Publisher do for Indie Games?

A small Indie team consisting of developers, artists and musicians are usually considered the Game Developers. If you go to any Steam page for a game, it usually lists the Developer and the Publisher.

Sometimes, these two are the same. Some studios have the knowledge and budget to do both tasks, allowing them to have creative control over every aspect of publishing a game.

A Game Publisher is usually in charge of marketing and distribution of the game, however, they can also be part of many other areas of the game development, such as funding the game, game scope decisions and legal help.

For Indie Games, having a Game Publisher can help offer valuable resources that a small team just wouldn't have access to otherwise. It allows the developers to focus on game design, whilst marketing, social media, legal, business and everything in between can be handed off to your game publisher.

Funding Your Game

In the early stages of developing your Indie Game, you're likely not to have the funds needed to create a game from scratch. Perhaps you have several thousand dollars saved up to create some prototypes and demos, but a fully-funded game is likely to cost much more than your initial budget.

That's where a Game Publisher can come in.

A contract can be drawn up where the Game Publisher funds the development of the game in return for a % of royalties. There are all sorts of different agreements and profit-sharing arrangements that each Game Publisher offers.

One of the most popular profit-sharing agreements is that once that game is launched, the Game Publisher earns a larger % of royalties until they are paid back their initial investment. Then the royalty % drops down to a more modest amount. This allows both the Indie Team and the Game Publisher to make a profit that otherwise wouldn't happen without the funding of the Game Publisher.

Marketing Your Game

Marketing is a giant rabbit hole that you can spend hours trying to master. Whether it's creating viral content on video platforms like YouTube, TikTok or Instagram, or releasing art concepts and teasers to try and get engagement for your game- all of this requires hours of planning and know-how.

With a Game Publisher, especially one that has lots of experience, you can speed up this process.

Game Publishers will have built up relationships with many gaming media outlets, allowing you to get eyes on your games in the form of articles, press releases, sponsored posts and more. For the Game Publisher, who has worked with gaming brands for years, it's a lot easier to get in the room.

For an Indie Team that has never released a game, building up a dedicated audience and getting gaming media outlets to take you seriously is a lot of work. Would your time be better spent polishing your game?

Game Experience

A Game Publisher also offers a wealth of experience that Indie Teams lack. A Game Publisher that has published a catalog of games is going to know all the ins and outs of games that can help with development decisions.

They can also help with finding the right people to work on your game, including artists, programmers, localization teams and other areas of game development that you might be struggling to find.

It's important to do your research when selecting a Game Publisher; you'll get more out of a Game Publisher that has experience in the same genre as your game compared to one that has never played a game like yours.

How To Find A Game Publishers

Once you've decided that getting a publisher for your game is a good idea, it's time to start looking.

This is one of the hardest parts of the whole process; weeding out those Game Publishers that will be the right fit for you, dodging the scammers and chancers and then convincing them that your game is worth their investment.

There are several ways to find a Game Publisher. But first, you need to think about the type of publisher you want. You want to try and find ones that will match your game's scope, budget and genre. The better the synergy between Game Publisher and Game Developer, the more likely the relationship will be a success.

We've included a list of Indie Game Publishers at the end of this article, so if your search does yield zero results, check that out!

Start with these areas:

• Google / Bing (plenty of game publishers advertise looking for the next big Indie Game.)
• Reddit: Gamedev, IndieGames
• Twitter/X: Search Tweets (now need an account)

One of the best methods is to actually take a look an games that are in your genre and write down all the game publishers. Steam is your best resource for this, since they list both Developer and Publisher on every game page.

You'll want to make a note of:

• How big was the Development Team
• How much funding will I need
• What areas of Game Publishing do I want covering

There's no point going after a Triple AAA Game Publisher when your bullet-hell game only needs $10,000 in funding and some marketing to go with it. They won't even entertain an interview with you.

Instead, look at games with a similar scope to yours and figure out what other games the publisher publishes.

What You Need To Get Signed By A Game Publisher

Once you find a Game Publisher you think will work well for your game, it's time to get in contact.

A lot of the time, each publisher will have their own process for applying so you'll want to check the publisher's website. Sometimes, it could be as simple as a Contact Us page, othertimes it could be submitting a google form with detailed information.

In any case, the chances of getting a deal will increase greatly if you can provide the following:

Pitch Deck

Creating a successful Pitch Deck is a whole other task that is better explained by this guide. It allows your potential publisher to get an idea of what your game is about without having to scroll through a hundred-page document.

Prototype / Demo

If you can show a demo of your game before seeking out a publisher this will allow the publisher to get a better idea of where your game is at and how it plays.

Business Plan / Game Design Plan

Whilst your game might be in the early stages, it is likely to change over the course of development. Having a detailed plan of your game and what your target audience can expect will allow the publisher to get a good idea of whether your game is worth investing in.

Structured Timeline for hitting Milestones

If a publisher is going to give you thousands of dollars to fund your game, having a concrete plan of how you're going to use those funds is imperative. You need to break down all development costs, including hiring developers, artists, musicians and your own salary.

You also need to show what milestones you plan to hit after X amount of months; when you plan to finish the game's development and when you plan to have certain materials ready for marketing.

List Of Indie Game Publishers

This is by no means an exhaustive list of Indie Game Publishers but are ones we think are worth giving a shot. We've listed some of the games they've published, so check them out before applying to see if you think your game will be a good fit.

Recommend An Indie Game Publisher

If you came across this page looking to advertise your Indie Game Publishing services, post a comment below and we will add you to our list!

If you're a game developer that has had success with a Game Publisher, let us know in the comments too! We'd love to hear about Indie Devs experience with game publishers.