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GameStop Forms Publishing Program GameTrust To 'Revolutionize' the Process (gamespot.com)
An anonymous reader writes: GameStop has announced today a publishing label called "GameTrust," which includes developers like Insomniac Games, Ready at Dawn, Tequila Works, and Frozenbyte. Mark Stanley, GameStop VP of Internal Development and Diversification, told GameSpot in a recent interview, "We do not involve ourselves in the creative process because at the end of the day, that is what our developer partners are passionate about," he explained. "By allowing developers to fully focus on their craft, GameTrust can focus on all other aspects of bringing a new IP to market, leveraging our deep expertise and retail channel leadership to support each developer and connect their games with a broader global audience." According to GameStop's program release, GameTrust will "revolutionize the game development and distribution process" by way of giving developers another option to bring their games to market, leveraging GameStop's leadership in the retail channel (including marketing and more) to help bring games to a larger audience. Everything "from casual to serious, console to PC, triple AAA titles to independent games" will be supported. They'll be available through all of GameStop's retail channels as well as Steam, Xbox Live, Playstation Network, the eShop, and others. The full interview with Mark Stanley can be found here. GameStop first revealed its foray into game publishing when Insomniac Games, developer of Ratchet and Clank Overdrive, unveiled its upcoming adventure game Song of the Deep.
....And by revolutionize, we mean, 'Halt revolution'.
translation: We will do anything we can to keep from being run out of business by steam....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Steam has the benefits of auto updating your games, keeping a copy of your saves in the cloud, and selling games very cheaply.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
It's a trap! They're trying to Uber the indies.
FCKGW 09F9 42
Desperate to stay relevant in the digital age. Brick and mortar retail software is finally dying the death that has been long overdue.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because someone skilled enough to code their own game is not going to be skilled enough to, say, write code for a website so you can download/register/activate it. Plenty of cloud-based solutions to accept all major credit cards nowadays, too. And then there's Steam - the place people already know about where digital games are sold.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Because someone skilled enough to code their own game is not going to be skilled enough to, say, write code for a website so you can download/register/activate it.
First, coding a website is a different skill from coding a game. A small 1- to 3-man indie studio may have to hire someone. But more importantly, "write code for a website" works for PC games, not so much for console games because the console maker limits who is allowed to have a devkit and how many titles are allowed to be released.
Not to mention a huge community, ability to join friends' multiplayer games, automated broadcasting/streaming as an option, game-based discussion boards, etc.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
anyone who refers to a game as "an IP" (or, worse, "a new IP") is either not a gamer or has been infected by MBA-speak.
Gamestop works by involving themselves in resale of games, and making a somewhat ridiculously huge profit per game. Presumably that's what it takes to inhabit prime retail space, but I'd rather just buy a game on eBay.
How will the games they publish be crippled to drive customers back into the store when they want to resell them?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can anyone else decipher this press release?
I'll give it a shot.
Are they setting up a Steam clone?
No. They are, however, funding and marketing games, and getting them on store shelves and Steam/Origin/UPlay/et al. I assume they're doing this for the same reason Netflix is making original content--to make sure they're not dependent on third-party content to keep their shelves stocked.
I'm also guessing they don't see much of a future in retail, so they're trying to pivot into the publishing business before they die off, which is probably more profitable anyway.
Why would I care about a new distributor?
You probably don't, unless you're a game studio looking for someone to finance your next game. In that case, you probably do, especially if you're not big enough to get the time of day out of one of the AAA publishers, or if "we do not involve ourselves in the creative process" sounds appealing.
In the abstract, you should probably care a little because more publishers funding games means more games get made, and GameStop has the potential (the potential) to fill an interesting middle ground between too-big-to-fails like Call of Battlefield Eleventy and no-budget, bottom-of-the-barrel, I-compiled-this-with-two-pirated-rubber-bands-and-kickstarter "indie" games. As in, budgets small enough to be able to take interesting creative risks without worrying about a twenty-brazillion dollar screw-up tanking the company, yet not so small that you have to resort to gimmicky pixel-art shit to get a hipster/10 rating on your Steam Greenlight.
And if nothing else, it's unusual for a large company to see the writing on the wall ahead of time, and actually try to do something about it before plowing head-on into the iceberg. This is kind of a man-bites-dog moment--we're witnessing the incumbent horse-buggy manufacturer trying their hand at self-driving cars.
DATABASE WOW WOW
And allowing you multiple copies on multiple machines. The only (and very sensible) restriction is you can only play on one machine at a time. So you can start a game on your computer in Los Angeles and finish it later in the week on your computer in London if you travel a lot, for example. Traveling with a bunch of CD's was a PITA, not to mention CD's get scratched/lost/stolen. And it's even worse if you have to start dragging game manuals/activation codes around with you everywhere.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Oh come on, unless your "coding" vocabulary consists of something totally weird, learning PHP won't take you more than an afternoon, HTML and CSS is pretty straightforward.
And people wonder why websites, especially those coded in PHP, get hacked all of the time and security sucks. You and your attitude are a big part of that my friend. Web development is a specialty just as surely as game development is. There are people who devote their careers to these disciplines and are excellent at them and then there are people like you who "taught themselves to code in an afternoon." Please approach the profession with the respect that it deserves, educate yourself and drop the cowboy coder attitude. If you cannot do that then please don't write code professionally. The world of software development already has enough security flaws, bugs and crappy code written by people who don't really know WTF they're doing. Don't be another one of those people.
It's just corporate doublespeak loaded with buzzwords.
All it really says is they want to stick their greedy fingers into the indie pie.
That kind of c#@&& is meaningless garbage used to bamboozle the stupid or ignorant investors and has no value.
One company I worked at, the new CEO came by to give us a speech and answer questions. It was a room full of techies. He tried doing the corporate doublespeak answers to us, and that didn't fly as the next person would tell him to answer the previous persons question. He was really pissed over us not falling for it. As far as I know, he never came back to our site. I guess he realized we weren't as dumb the people he usually talked to.
This is the truth, having a website requires so much more than having setting up a server so everyone can use git or similar. The hell to having to setup domians, getting certs, firefwall, ftp, balancing servers and so on.
Just using php and thlm and css nowadays will be short unless you are talking about html 5 that is basically javascript
So it's hardly inspiring to hear they're having a second go. What if that flops too?
Aside from that, all these damned vertical stores are a nuisance. We have Steam, GOG (Galaxy), EA Origin, Ubisoft Unity, Microsoft Store and probably a heap of second tier contenders. It's a pain in the ass for consumers and anti-consumer and a pain in the ass for developers.
The last thing anyone needs is yet another vertical market from Gamestop. It's unlikely to succeed and even if it did, it's just more bloat and fragmentation. Frankly there is no reason at all that all of these services couldn't share a common infrastructure for sign on, patches, trophies etc.
ability to join friends' multiplayer games
I disagree with you on this one. I yearn for the days of yore minimizing Counter Strike to IM my friend, or screaming across my apartment: "DUDE! What's the IP of that server you are on? ... Fuck, I can't join, only reserved admin spots left. Find another server that's playing DE_DUST!
Not to mention how fun it was searching through all my shit to find my Half-Life CD key after re-installing Windows on my new AMD K6-III macine.
Ah, those were the days...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Holy crap, as expensive as AAA titles are, I can only imagine what AAAAAAAAA titles will run...
As for console devs - if you say there's a barrier to entry via the dev kit (I don't know much about console coding)
Console makers traditionally require "relevant industry experience", "financial stability", and a "secure office" (source: warioworld.com) before a developer can purchase required tools. Before about 2012, home offices were not considered "secure" in this manner. And it's difficult for an indie studio to show "relevant industry experience" if its employees haven't lived in the Austin, Boston, or Seattle area.
then Gamestop is already shooting itself in the foot looking for "indie" developers who probably can't afford that barrier to entry in the first place, right?
A publisher can help developers find resources to port a finished or nearly finished game to another platform. For example, a company as big as GameStop is a shoo-in for "financial stability".