3 Key Things to Pay Attention to when Choosing a Publisher

At least two dozen publishers worth paying attention to are currently working on the hyper-casual games market. How to choose the right one, — says in his column on App2Top.ru Nadav Ashkenazy, CEO of ironSource marketing company and Supersonic Studios game publishing house.

Nadav Ashkenazi
Working with a publisher rather than independently is the right decision for many developers.

Such cooperation at the start allows you to scale the success of the game. However, choosing the “one and only” requires painstaking work. Answering the question “Who to entrust the game to” is not so easy.

I’m not that experienced in making such decisions, but I’ve seen and talked to thousands of developers who have ventured into it. Thanks to communication and learning from other people’s experience, I was able to understand what is important for game teams, and then took these things into account when launching Supersonic.

Here are three key tips to consider:

1. Look for a long-term partner

Instead of changing the publisher after each release, it’s better to choose a partner with whom you can go a long way.

To evaluate the current partner, it will be enough to answer the following questions:

• is this publisher helping you become a cooler developer, or is he only interested in the success of a particular game?
• does the publisher understand how you work, your niche?
• is there mutual trust in your relationship?
• is your opinion taken into account, is there a feeling that you have lost, among other things, creative control over the game?
• can your cooperation be called a full-fledged partnership?

It is impossible to achieve stable success (as well as enjoy the path to its top) without a well-established relationship with your publisher. Look for those who are ready to listen to you, understand your position. You have more chances for successful and long-term cooperation, for joint growth if you have built a system within which you regularly communicate and respect each other.

Trust is also a key component of a successful relationship. The best way to create and maintain trust is transparency. Look for publishers who willingly and constantly share data, market trends, and other various information. If they share all this with you, it means that they plan to invest in you, and not just in the performance of a single game.

Our Superstars program is based on the same principle. We strive to share best practices and data with our development partners, give them access to all the necessary information about the performance of their games so that the teams themselves can grow and develop. The more transparency, the better the decisions we make together.

2. Choose a publisher who conducts quick tests

Unfortunately, due to the highly competitive nature of mobile games (and especially hyper-casual games), many products are not sufficiently interesting to the market. As a result, only the rapid creation and testing of games allows you not to get bogged down in the quagmire, investing in concepts that are not worth attention.

It is for this reason that we recommend starting development with the creation of an MVP (minimal viable product), with its help you can check the relevance of the concept before direct development. MVP should include only the first few levels and basic functionality. This is enough to make several commercials to assess market demand.

This is where rapid testing comes on the scene. At the earliest stage of development, it is first of all important to find out CPI, retention and playtime. It is desirable that you do not need to configure everything manually and with a bunch of approvals. So the developer needs a platform that makes it easy to download and test the game. The publisher should have one.

It is also very important that an expert from the publisher is always on hand if the MVP begins to show promise. He will just tell you whether more creatives are needed for testing, whether the game is ready for further development and whether it requires any improvements at the concept level.

An established, automated testing process allows developers to quickly figure out where to invest resources and where not. Plus, it allows the publisher to conduct testing on a large scale. In other words, the number of games with a chance of success increases.

By the way, in July Supersonic just launched a platform that systematizes the testing process. With its help, you can find out with a certain degree of probability whether the game will become profitable and at the same time scalable in marketing terms.

3. Look for a publisher with excellent expertise in the implementation of games

You want your game to achieve financial success. This goes without saying. This requires a partner who is an expert in every field of game implementation.

Most hyper-casual studios consist of a game designer, a couple of developers and, possibly, an artist. It is clear that the publisher takes care of everything else. And he should be well versed in all these “other” areas.

Just being well-versed in UA and monetization is not enough, the publisher must be as deeply into the topic as possible. Only thanks to this, he will be able to introduce new original approaches and practices. It is necessary that the publisher has specialists who are able to look at the game as a whole, and not just track KPIs, because long—term success is a story about building scalable profitability, which cannot be built solely on numbers.

And here I can’t do without a drop of self-promotion. Developers who cooperate with Superstars just get such experts who are well versed not only in conducting advertising campaigns, managing scalable purchases and monetization strategies, but also in creative analytics, game funnels, optimization, localization and much, much more.

When working with us, of course, we are talking not only about access to experts, but also about access to the latest technologies that we develop and launch at ironSource.

I believe that every developer should have a chance to get access to all this. That’s why we are holding the Supersonic Superstars contest now. Each winning studio will receive $ 150 thousand, as well as an invitation to become our partner. The contest will run from November 1 to December 17, 2020.