While digital offerings don’t have to worry about their games not being available, standing out from the crowd is often difficult. Trip Hawkins, CEO of Digital Chocolate, says that developers will have to enlist other means to get attention for their games.
“When Apple launched the iPhone, when Facebook launched their app API, when Android and Google Plus followed suit, you started to see all these offers where ‘Hey, if you’re a developer, just come to me. You don’t need a publisher,'” said Hawkins. “I think that honeymoon is ending now because if you have a million apps in an app store, just because your app is in an app store, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be discovered. So you’ve got issues about how you’re going to bring traffic to it.”
To Hawkins, the solution is for publishers to help with discovery. He was also critical of the cut that app store owners take for digital sales.
“I think for developers increasingly, they’re going to have to try to then figure out, ‘Well how do I get my discovery problem solved ‘ If they can’t finance it themselves, then maybe they need to partner with a publisher that’s good at it,” he said. “Retailers in the old days not only solved the distribution problem, they solved the discovery problem. In the very beginning with iPhone, with Android, with Facebook, they also solved the discovery problem because there wasn’t much there. As you got up into the thousands and thousands of things that are there, they’re no longer solving the discovery problem.”
“They don’t really in fact deserve 30 percent of the value chain anymore,” added Hawkins. “The 30 percent number is kind of arbitrary. That number makes no sense whatsoever anymore.”
Source: Gamasutra
