Developed VS. Published

This is a subject that I want to hopefully clarify, because there seems to be some confusion here. I remember a while back, when Dishonored came out, people were refusing to buy Dishonored because it had Bethesda stamped on it. They, mostly PS3 owners, were angry because of Bethesda's debacle and mishandling of the PS3 version of TESV:Skyrim, resulting in the PS3 version suffering stuttering frame rates and no DLC. I also remember when Skyrim came out and people were complaining, and boycotting, Skyrim because it was, inevitably, going to have bugs. The reason they predicted this was from looking at Bethesda's past work, however they quoted Fallout New Vegas as among that list. Finally I also remember when LA Noire came out and people were disappointed because it was so radically different from other Rockstar games that they wondered if Rockstar lost their edge.

I want to clarify this. Dishonored was developed by Arkane and Published by Bethesda. Fallout New Vegas was developed by Obsidian and published by Bethesda. La Noire was developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar. What does this mean?

Let me explain it this way. Arkane studios had this great idea for a game they called Dishonored, but they didn't have the money to make it. Games cost money to make, after all you have to buy computers to program, development kits, pay people, pay licenses ect. So Arkane studios didn't have the money to make their game so what do they do? They go to someone who does, i.e. the Publisher. In this case Bethesda. Bethesda says "Okay. We like your idea. We will pay you to make your game, but in return we want the rights to it." Essentially Bethesda buys everything that Arkane studios wants or needs for their game, and they pay the people working on the game.

Now what can happen, and we see this happen a lot with Call of Duty games, is that the Publisher (Bethesda, or in the case of Call of Duty; Activision) says "Okay we've paid you X amount of dollars. This was the amount that we promised to pay you when we signed the contract. This game now belongs to us and we are tired of paying out and not getting anything so we are going to release this game to the world. (Note this only sometimes happens, not every publisher is like this)So now the game is released onto the world.

Here is where another misconception happens. "The developer doesn't get paid from used sales." While this is true the developer barely gets paid from new sales. The developer get's paid, by the publisher, before the game is even released. The majority of new sales go straight to the publisher.

Anyways back to the original point. Now that the game is on the market the publisher is now hoping to recoup their money and gain a profit. To put it into a math formula where X is the amount the publisher paid the developer to make the game and Y is the amount of money they've made from sales. Z would be the total in deficit or profit. It would look something like this (-X+Y=Z). If Z is a positive number (meaning the publisher made more money selling the game than it cost them to publish the game) than it is more likely that we will see another game by that developer because the publisher is more likely to pay for that developer team to make another game. Where as -Z would mean that the publisher lost money (It cost more to publish the game than they made in sales) it is less likely we will see another game from that developer.

The point of this blog was to A) Explain the difference between a Developer and a Publisher and B) Educate. Think about a game before you buy it, or choose not to buy it. Just because Bethesda or Rockstar is on the box doesn't mean they made the game. Find out who actually made the game and make preconceptions based on the developers past works, not the Publishers. The Publisher has very little to do with the overall quality of the game.