How do publisher's effect their communite's

Introduction

Over the past decades, gaming has become a staple in society. People have come together for the games they love. And a lot of the time, triple-a games fail because of their publishers. Being a gamer myself I’ve seen first hand what publishers can do to their fans. I decided to research. Are triple-A publishers good for the gaming community? Publishers provide more good than bad to their games communities. But there are things they could improve on. In this inquiry we're going to be going over what publishers and game developers are, and what they do. The positives and negatives effects publishers have of their communities. And what does the majority of all communities want to see?

What are game publishers /game developers?

Having a gaming publisher behind you is extremely important. It could either make or break the developer’s game. In the game industry developers are commonly referred to as devs. The dev teams’ job is to make sure that they have a fully functioning fun game. The publisher focuses on publicity, finance, and looking over their devs. A triple-A game is a game that is produced by a big publisher. All the games about to be listed are triple-A games. The past 20 years has brought great game’s and trilogy’s for example, Halo, Call of Duty, and Minecraft - all great games. The games I listed have had some great, and not so great publishers. Some popular game publishers are Electronic Arts ( or EA ), Activistion, and Microsoft. Lastly, some popular dev teams are Bungie, Treyarch, and Mojang. The outlier games like Valorant, Fall Guys and Five Nights at Freddys, were published by their developers. This doesn’t make them bad games by any means, it only means they were less likey to succeed.

Positives Publishers have on gaming communities

Publishers bring a lot to a games dev and that game’s community. The two most important things are: bigger budget, marketing. Having a publisher behind the devs game gives them a bigger budget and more resources. Good marketing for a game is very positive for a gaming community. It lets them know the details, and gets people hyped. The more people hyped the more sales the game will make. For example, the budget for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 ( devoloped by Treyarch and Published by Activistion ) was estimated to be NZ$28.4M to $44.2M. Within 24 hours of Black Ops 2’s release it was grossing at a staggering $500M. I chose Black Ops 2 because I believe it had the best marketing in the series ( link will be in the bibliography ). These positives help the devs make fun games for their communities, the better you make a game the bigger and better the community will be.

Negatives Publishers have on gaming communities

Having a publisher can be a nightmare for their communities. The two worst things are control and greed. When the devs are making their game they want you to see it through their eyes. In order to do that they need time, and money. Taking one of these away, you end up with a poor attempt at a game. A publisher has full control over everything in a game’s development. Meaning they can change features and set deadline’s. Triple-A titles can do pre-sales for their game, If a publisher set a deadline that was impossible to meet and puts out a pre-sale. They can send the game out completely broken ( example, CyberPunk 2077 ). Everybody that brought a pre-sale was scammed out of their money, and the game and publisher's brand at that point are tarnished, but they made profit. Because they have full control, they can implement toxic money making methods. A good example would be Star Wars Battlefront 2, on release this game had loot boxes players could buy, giving them a random chance of getting something in game like a character. Because of the game’s leveling system it meant it would take 40+ hours to unlock a character if you didn’t want to gamble. The average player wouldn’t be able to grind those kinds of hours, almost forcing them to buy loot boxes. Unfortunately lootboxes became a trend, for a few years most gaming companies were adding them to their game. Thankfully that trend is dead.

What does the Community want?

You can’t please everyone. The majority of a game’s community just wants a fun experience. While researching ( and from personal experience ), a lot of dev teams don’t communicate with their community as much as they should. A good example of this is the Call of Duty franchise ( COD for short). After 19 published COD installments you can say that they’ve run out of ideas more than once. And when that happens it ends in disaster. What they need to do is talk to the COD community, hold polls and surveys online. Asking people what they want to see and what new things should be added. Communication is key. Another thing most games should have are some form of mod tools. Mod tools are tools players can use to make their own assets inside the game. This means that people in the community can make their own mods, maps, gamemodes, weapons, ect. Whatever your game is centred around, they can make their own version. After people make things with mod tools, they can post it onto the game for other players to play and have fun. It's free content for the devs and publishers and more reasons to buy the game for the community. Personally it blows my mind that more games don’t use that idea.

Thesis/Conclusion

In Conclusion publisher’s provide more positives than negatives to the gaming community. With the resources and funding they provide to devs to make fun games. With the marketing they provide to sell the game. They are necessary to making strong and thriving games. Fixing negative’s, they need to stop adding gambling and paying for features after purchase. The only exception being cosmetics like skins etc. Things we need to see more of is communicating with the community more, and taking on their advice. Letting the community be creative and make their own fun experiences with mod tools. And overall thinking with a player first mindset. Thanks for reading.