Bungie makes 10-year deal... with Activision

[Patters]

I don't know how you managed to make that leap. Publishers sells more boxed copies because that's what consumers buy more of. If everything went 100% digital, publishers would still be around to publish the games. It's actually a benefit to publishers because there's no used-games market for digital sales and you have no manufacturing costs for boxes, manuals, disks, display stands in Best Buy, etc.

Publishers do a lot more in the process than physically take a disk and put it into a box.

He's kidding.

[deveus]

He's kidding.

Crap. How did I miss that? He even put up a disclaimer =(

[toblix]

I'm not kidding, I'm just that dumb.

I don't know how you managed to make that leap. Publishers sells more boxed copies because that's what consumers buy more of. If everything went 100% digital, publishers would still be around to publish the games. It's actually a benefit to publishers because there's no used-games market for digital sales and you have no manufacturing costs for boxes, manuals, disks, display stands in Best Buy, etc.

Publishers do a lot more in the process than physically take a disk and put it into a box.

Obviously they do, but how critical is any of it to actually getting a game to market? Testing just came to mind -- I expect they can have hordes of testers, the number of which would be unreasonable for most developers.

Of course they can go digital as well, and to some extent they already have, but would they be able to make nearly as much money from it when:

1. They're not doing the physical distribution thing, which must be quite costly (and so they can't charge for it, I guess?)
   
2. They'll be going after Steam, which at this point seems ridiculous.
   

Maybe they'll go from being a link in the "production chain", where everything goes through them, to more of a support organization for smaller developers?

I'm really thinking about game publishers as working the same way as book publishers, in that they're really just something that evolved to let one person get their stuff out to as many as possible, but that, with the Power of the Internet, is not really essential anymore, as an author can publish to everyone from his home computer. Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think maybe because he was going to say that publishers will front the money for a lot of development, but not all the time.

I think the use of publishers could be simply gotten rid of by a game studio hiring a few marketing people, attracting certain investors, as well as someone who knows how to manage the QA and platforms the game will be published on.

I don't understand the use of anyone arguing how important publishers are in the lives of video games and that they really should be kept alive.