Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions (Part 5)

Sramana: How do you cross-promote within your own game titles?

Keela Robison: We will identify a time management player among our catalog and make a recommendation to that player for them to check out a similar game from one of our partners.

Sramana: When you look at your relationship with the studios, how many studios are you working with, and what are their dynamics?

Keela Robison: We work with about 400 different studios. Those studios span a broad array of sizes and capabilities. A dozen of the studios we work with are quite sizable. They have more than 100 developers and they are developing multiple games a year. They work with us because we bring them an audience they cannot get on their own.

Some large developers want to do all of the marketing services and are not interested in doing a revenue sharing model with us, but they do want to cross-promote their games with our audience and among their game users. We allow game developers to join GameHouse Promotion Network without having to take a revenue sharing commitment from us. That is completely free, and we recommend it for any developer of any size.

Smaller developers who have under 50 employees will find it very difficult to cover all of the required functions. They will have to develop relationships with the various app stores in order to get editorial featuring. We have those experts on our team, and we can evangelize their product.

Sramana: What are the revenue levels of the larger shops that have more than 100 developers? What is a reasonable revenue band for that type of shop?

Keela Robison: It really depends on their cost structure. There are developers who have 100 people located in Russia or China, and they may only be doing $10 million to $20 million in revenue. They can afford that because of their development cost. There are shops that make substantially more than that on games that are not staffed substantially higher.

What is interesting in the game space is that there is not a credible correlation between the team size and your revenues. It varies based on cost structure and game popularity.

Sramana: Would it be fair to say that most of the studios you partner with are sub-million dollar companies with about a dozen earning above $1 million?

Keela Robison: I think that is a fair way to access the 400 studios we partner with.

Sramana: They are obviously making revenue working with you, and they are able to sustain themselves through this business model.

Keela Robison: That is true. There are hobbyists out there who build games in addition to whatever their primary income is. We don’t tend to work with hobbyists. We tend to work with studios that have multiple people on staff. To be clear, we are one distribution channel. If we partner with a studio on the mobile distribution channel, then we require an exclusive arrangement. On the PC there is no need for exclusivity. We often work with our studio partners for an exclusivity window, after which time they can also go distribute on other websites. We will even offer to wholesale their games on their behalf. We have wholesale relationships with major portals such as MSN and Amazon. We continue to get revenue streams from those areas for our partners and ourselves.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Getting Your Game to Players: Keela Robison, VP of GameHouse Distributions
1 2 3 4 5 6 7