As Salamatov said, two years ago, he and his partners realized that publishing indie projects on consoles alone is becoming more and more difficult. At the same time, the publishing market is not oversaturated: many good projects come out, but they go unnoticed, so it makes sense to give them a significant boost using the methods that the publisher can provide.
Salamatov added that he was engaged in publishing, because, firstly, he had decent experience in this area, and secondly, because it is possible to work with many projects at once. And in development, you have to spend two to three years on one game. So in the publishing business, there are more attempts and more varied content. Plus, it’s just more interesting.
The second moment at the founding of META Publishing is managerial. My idea was to make the company with an inclusive approach to employees in terms of decision making. Giving people more freedom and the ability to collaborate will work better than micromanaging and controlling everyone like a dictator.
Ilya Salamatov
CEO, META PublishingGrabelnikov joined when the company was just formed – he was one of the first employees. Now the company has about 30 people. Half operate a large online project, the other half are engaged in indie games on consoles.
Kuzmin noted that in the process of operating a project, small features are periodically launched. And in publishing, the cycles are longer, and they are new every time. Salamatov said that this does not become a problem for the company, because the teams work in different rhythms and independently of each other, so that all resources are not spent on one thing.
Publisher’s work on the example of the game Biped
Biped is a puzzle platformer developed by Tencent’s Next Studios. Tencent has over 400 employees, including a few small teams that do experimental things. Salamatov has been working with Tencent for a long time – they even did joint projects – in 101XP he was engaged in a project under the Naruto license.
He told the people at Tencent about META Publishing, and they started looking for projects to collaborate with. In the end, Salamatov offered good terms and Tencent agreed. In the end, they agreed a couple of months before the release. META Publishing faced a huge challenge: there were very few people, and it was necessary to launch the first project from Tencent in two months.
According to Grabelnikov, it was originally planned to launch the version simultaneously on PCs and consoles. It was necessary to prepare all platforms in two months. At the same moment, Sony switched to the content pipeline – to a new system of submission and withdrawal of games. META Publishing was one of the first companies to go through this process. At the same time, a PC release was being prepared. On the day of the release, it turned out to release the game not on all sites – the game was released on Steam immediately, and the release on GOG was delayed.
Even before the release, META Publishing partnered with Human Fall Flat – they released several news to their audience. The companies even negotiated a cross-coupon sale, but after a month Steam closed the program for all publishers. This was another surprise on the way to release.