Independent publishing or to find a publisher?

[aipioneer]

We are developing a browser based strategy game which bases on the cutting-edge automated conversation technology. The game also provides a novel community system that players may upgrade and maintain relationships with other players.

The first version almost complete.

How do you think we publish by ourselves online or to find a professional publisher?

Is there any case that a browser based game is published successfully by the 3rd-party publisher here?

Thanks.

[Nickson]

There hasn't been released any game by a mwg developer in collaboration with a publishing party as far as I know. Whether this is interesting or not, is a choice your team should think of properly and weigh the benefits versus the disadvantages, because there are quite a few that might be rather important depending on how your team profiles themselves.

A big publisher, like bigpoint or others, require that you play by their rules. Your game will need to adapt certain APIs and methods in order to work with their global player network. This means that you actually need to recode quite a few things without any guarantee that they will accept you, which might take quite a while depending on your actual game. If the concept is truly unique you'll get to the quality testing phase rather easy, but that doesn't mean you'll pass that easily, so keep that in mind as well. They can bring in a huge amount of players however, so that might be a huge benefit, just make sure your game can handle it and be prepared to share your revenue, they don't bring them free ;).

Should you take on a publisher? If your concept is quite unique and properly designed, I would say no. Just because you keep in full control and people will come anyway. If it's good, it's good.. But this is something you should decide within your team. Do some research around some publishers, compare them to each other, and get a clear view of the situation and make a decision based on that and not on what we all say.

[aipioneer]

Than you for your suggestion.

We are preparing to publish the game by ourselves currently.

As you said, we can not depend on a publisher at this stage.

It seems many publishers take more than half year to review the games.

I'd better let final players to review at the same time. :)