Right now, I know very well what the game is about, how to market it, which platforms it should come out on. They are asking you when the game will be released. I mean publishers expect a clear answer from you, but you’re just not there, not sure yet. But they aren’t! It’s just that publishing companies are often made up of business development folks who do not necessarily understand the creative side of the development process. To them, it might look like developers are sabotaging the talks on purpose. But maybe this is something not a lot of publishers appreciate enough. And so I kept putting off these conversations, and at some point they stopped calling. But there they were, proposing revenue share numbers, discussing platforms, while I had no idea when I would even finish the game. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what kind of game Selfloss was shaping up to be. I thought I was ready to communicate with publishers, I just didn’t expect them to start emailing me three months into development. Sometimes I feel bad about failing to keep the conversation going on my end. Actually, they left a very good impression. Well… I think the first one to contact me was Crytivo. The rest of the publishers initiated the communication themselves.Īnd you knew from the get-go what you wanted from publishers? Of these 50, I myself have only approached two, Annapurna and Versus Evil. But during the three years since the beginning of development, I talked with around 40 or 50 different publishers in total. At first, it was four or five small publishers, like Crytivo. Or maybe a bit earlier, when Selfloss won Best Indie at another show. It was then that publishers started reaching out. In 2019, Selfloss was featured in Indie Cup, Eastern Europe’s largest indie games contest. For the sake of getting connections, if nothing else.Īnd? Did you get the attention of publishers right away? But as early as 2018, I knew that I would set up my processes so as to attract not just players, but publishers, too. So I really committed to the development in the summer of 2020. I started making Selfloss at the end of 2018, but at the time, I was pretty busy at graduate school. How long have you been working on Selfloss? I think at some point you need to work with a publisher to understand how the industry functions. And it’s not that I want to see if I can make more money with a publisher. ![]() I wanted to learn everything that’s happening around development, including marketing and publishing. This time, I knew from the very beginning that I didn’t just want to focus on the production part. I’m building it on Unreal, unlike the two previous projects that I made with Unity. Now I’m working on my third game, Selfloss. Like why would I want to waste a percentage of my revenue on publishing? Since then, I have grown up as a developer. At that time, like most newbie indies, I thought that since I was making a game, I knew best how to market it. I made them on my own, no external developers or outsourced marketing. Since then, I have released two full-fledged commercial titles on Steam, all without a publisher. Back then, my student project won the Grand Prix at an awards show for indie games. I’ve been making games since around 2016. Oleg Nesterenko, managing editor at GWO: Alex, a few words about yourself and Selfloss?
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