When talking about a developer that terminated their contract with 10k, the author says: "There was a moment to reconsider the contract and I've failed to explain our value." After reading the first chapter and skimming the remaining chapters, I have no idea what value they were providing either.

I am cynical, perhaps even bitter and jaded, but it sounds like this kind of publisher business is parasitic. They seek out devs that are naive, promise them "publisher stuff" and some devs don't really know any better and just assume the publisher is doing something for them. In some small percentage of cases a lucky publisher finds just the right naive dev, signs a contract and finds themselves with a cash cow. It literally sounds like they would just seek out any dev with a heartbeat, offer them "publisher stuff" (like testing? level design? documentation?), sign them to a contract and hope they would eventually get a hit.

So my unflattering take of what little I understood of this jumbled story was that this parasitic organization (that sounds completely dysfunctional) was unable to find a suitable victim.

He talks about his pitch to developers: "You will get months of unpaid work under our supervision…" He talks about building his team: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks"

Everything here just seems terrible to me.

I don’t know anything about the game dev or publishing business. What I do know though it that many tech teams are good at tech but often not so good at other tasks that are all part of a successful business. That starts with project management, goes over organisation or knowledge how to run a company and ends in knowing how to make profit.

There is also nothing wrong with this. I have described 3-4 different departments in a company. Chances are you are not good (enough) in all of them, and even if you are you won’t have time to do all of it good.

There is also value to just know how a industry works. As a new starter you can make your own experiences or you pay for existing experience, one way or another. This is an important business decision that you have to make. Make or buy. You simply can’t do everything yourself. So what to make and what to buy.

I don’t know if this is what publisher do (the name suggests otherwise) but I guess every dev team that thinks they have a hit still have a lot of non game dev related evaluations and decisions to make and sometimes you have to pay people with the right expertise to help you.

I would not argue against the value of professional services. Two that come to mind immediately are lawyers and accountants. It is probably a good idea to seek out professional advice for those. I think a similar case could be made for marketing and sales. One thing to note about lawyers and accountants is that you need accreditation to offer those services. That helps to keep the worst kind of parasitic behavior under control, although it isn't perfect.

But the real defense of my argument is in my own weasel words. "this kind of publisher business is parasitic."

Again, lets just consider the words in the article, starting with the quote I already cited: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks". The CEO of this publishing house hired totally inexperienced people, gave them a couple of months of scripted tasks and then sold them to developers as experts.

Second, another couple of quotes: "That's how within two years we have cooperated with almost 150 studios and produced 40+ games simultaneously at the peak." and "all in all there were 6 ROAS-positive soft launches, none of which didn’t happen as a hit."

I find these a bit hard to parse, but what I gather is that they worked on at least 40+ games of which only 6 had positive metrics and none of which was a success. Imagine that in a world of professionals like lawyers and accountants: having worked with that many businesses and never won a case or successfully balanced the books.

The real tragedy, IMO, is that there are likely numerous examples of publishers with equal levels of inexperience (or incompetence) that probably just happened to luck across the right dev at the right moment. Once you sign a contract with one of these leeches you are on the hook to pay them even if the "expert advice" provided by their 6 month veterans is as worthless as you would expect.

So absurd.

Their target is described as games almost-finished in 4 months at most, starting from 0, so they chose mobile tycoons, idle clickers, which are indeed finishable in 4 months if you scrub the bottom of the barrel.

For that reasons there is lots of them.

Then another case study is copying one of the most successful idlers and failing at it, yeah dawg that exists already.

It takes a fuck ton of more work with a 4 months deadline in a very small or one person team and actually making something meaningful that isn't an exact clone of something. Let alone exact clone, 4 months isn't even enough to clone something more complex.

This publisher also doesn't seem to have done anything to add value in the end anyway.

Had they bought ready-to-publish games that are of this type and reskinned it with passable assets and advertised it on tiktok, they'd have better chance at turning a profit.

Not to give any ideas though.

Yeah, there's precious little description of their planned/actual games here. Just mobile game jargon like "match-2", "conversions", "hypercasual", etc. My read is that if they were successful they would have been another publisher flooding instagram with adverts where you supposedly have to save some lady from the the cold by doing puzzles (but the actual game a tedious base-building slog with MTX for every possible action).

No offense to the author, but we have enough of these. Thanks.

Something about this feels off to me; it has the form of bold transparency, but I don't end up with much clarity. I really want to hear about this from some of the game developers they worked with.

They lost me immediately in section one. No idea what they are talking about.

Oh thank goodness it's not just me. These two introductory sentences gave me an instant headache:

> In the stone age of gamedev (like 7-8y ago) developers were more interested in publishers. Finding new partners was like a supermarket trip within devs’ events, conferences, communities, and checking one own mailbox.

To the writer, if you're reading, please try to imagine your audience and remember they don't know what you know. "More interested in publishers" than what? Than publishers were interested in developers? Than they were interested in self-publishing? This is like...half a thought, from my perspective.

And then you introduce an interaction with "partners." I don't know what that means...partners for whom? Without context, "supermarket trip" carries no meaning as an analogy. At this point, I stopped reading because I got this Markov chain/bad LLM feeling where my cognitive load is pegged at maximum but no meaning is getting through.

Writing is hard. You know your subject 1000x better than your readers (that's why they're reading) so you have to work hard to apply "theory of mind" to try to understand your output as they will. Maybe send a draft to an uninitiated friend or colleague to see if it makes sense to them without explanation.

To be honest, If you read the whole thing it becomes more clear. But I get what you mean.

You rarely read a text where someone tries to honestly (I feel that the author is) analyse their own failure. If you think further it’s also interesting where that doesn’t completely work.

I feel this a hard text to write on more than one level, so people should at least read it before criticising too harshly.

You are of course right that it's difficult, laudable and unusual to document failures. I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from reading or writing something like this. At least in my current mental state I simply couldn't power through the text, and my intent was to be constructive so that similarly valuable works might be more accessible in the future.

I got the impression English is not the Author's native language.

If that's the case, I applaud the writer's efforts and can definitely see how working in a second language could hinder the already difficult work of trying to model your audience. As a shameful monoglot myself, I'm in no position to judge.

They're clearly Russian, so second language seems likely.

Same for me. It is nit clear the problem they tried to solve

This was incredibly difficult to follow. Granted mobile game dev is not my field but it felt like a bunch of nonsense. If you can't clearly outline what value you provide in a couple paragraphs of rambling then I'm not too surprised you failed.

Then we get to the next section (which I had to skip to after rereading the first one a few times and still completely lost) and we find they are targeting idle games, aka a scourge on gaming. Can idle games be fun and non-predatory? Yes, I'm sure they can but I've watched a few indie devs who accomplished this then got greedy (Eggs Inc comes to mind). The incentives are all to milk your users and find new ways to force/trick/entice them into buying 100 gems/coins/bullshit.

I refuse to download games with recurring IAP. Level/campaign packs, "remove ads", "full unlock" are all fine but if I see gems/coins/power/etc then I'm out. Those games are so predictable and only exist to extract money, not to actually be fun.

In the end I'm still unsure why this "publisher" even needed to exist (I don't understand the value they were providing) and I'm glad they failed if they is the type of trash they were fostering.