Video game publishers are companies that publish video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer. Most video game publishers also produce and publish computer games, but the term "video game publisher" is often used generically to refer to companies that publish interactive games regardless of the target platform. This article is concerned with the production of books, magazines, and other literary material (whether in printed or electronic formats). ... Namcos Pac-Man was a hit, and became a cultural phenomenon. ... A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates computer or video games. ... A computer game is a game composed of a computer-controlled virtual universe that players interact with in order to achieve a defined goal or set of goals. ... Tug of war is an easily organized, impromptu game that requires little equipment. ...

Overview

As with book publishers or publishers of DVD movies, video game publishers are responsible for their product's manufacturing and marketing, including market research and all aspects of advertising. They usually finance the game development, sometimes by paying a video game developer (the publisher calls this external development) and sometimes by paying an internal staff of developers called a studio. The large video game publishers also distribute the games they publish, while some smaller publishers instead hire distribution companies (or larger video game publishers) to distribute the games they publish. Other functions usually performed by the publisher include deciding on and paying for any license that the game may utilize; paying for localization; layout, printing, and possibly the writing of the user manual; and the creation of graphic design elements such as the box design. Large publishers may also attempt to boost efficiency across all internal and external development teams by providing services such as sound design and code packages for commonly needed functionality. A publisher is a person or entity which engages in the act of publishing. ... DVD (commonly Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc) is an optical disc storage media format that can be used for data storage, including movies with high video and sound quality. ... Manufacturing, a branch of industry which accounts for about one-quarter of the worlds economic activity, is the application of tools and a processing medium to the transformation of raw materials into finished goods for sale. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Marketing is a social and managerial function that attempts to create, expand and maintain a collection of customers. ... Market research is the process of systematic gathering, recording and analyzing of data about customers, competitors and the market. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Billboards and street advertising in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, (2005) Advertising is paid communication through a non-personal medium in which the sponsor is identified and the message is controlled. ... A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates computer or video games. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Distribution is one of the four aspects of marketing. ... It has been suggested that Licensing (strategic alliance) be merged into this article or section. ... Internationalization and localization[1] are means of adapting products such as publications, hardware or software for non-native environments, especially other nations and cultures. ... Sound effects or audio effects are artificially created or enhanced sounds, or sound processes used to emphasize artistic or other content of movies, video games, music, or other media. ...

Because the publisher usually finances development, it usually tries to manage development risk with a staff of producers or project managers to monitor the progress of the developer, critique ongoing development, and assist as necessary. Most video games created by an external video game developer are paid for with periodic advances on royalties. These advances are paid when the developer reaches certain stages of development, called milestones. A game producer is the person in charge of overseeing development of a video or computer game. ... It has been suggested that Project triangle be merged into this article or section. ... A Spanish kilometre stone A milestone on the Boston Post Road in Harvard Square, Massachusetts, USA Slate milestone near Bangor, Wales A milestone or kilometre sign is one of a series of numbered markers placed along a road at regular intervals, typically at the side of the road or in...

Business risks

As businesses go, video game publishing is risky: For other uses, see Risk (disambiguation). ...

• The Christmas selling season accounts for about half of the industry's yearly sales of video and computer games, leading to a concentrated glut of high-quality competition every year in every game category, all in the fourth quarter of the year.

• Product slippage is very common due to the uncertain schedules of software development. Most publishers have suffered a "false launch", in which the development staff assures the company that game development will be completed by a certain date, and a marketing launch is planned around that date, including advertising commitments, and then after all the advertising is paid for, the development staff announces that the game will "slip", and will actually be ready several months later than originally intended. When the game finally appears, the effects among consumers of the marketing launch—excitement and "buzz" over the release of the game and an intent to purchase—have dissipated, and lackluster interest leads to weak sales. These problems are compounded if the game is supposed to ship for the Christmas selling season, but actually slips into the subsequent year.

• There is a consensus in the industry that it has increasingly become more "hit driven" over the past decade, with masses of consumers buying the game that is best in quality and best-marketed in each game genre, and, by comparison, very few buying any other games in that genre. This has led to much larger game development budgets, as every game publisher tries to ensure that its game is #1 in its category.

• Games are becoming more expensive to produce. The "next generation" of consoles, led by the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, have incredible graphic ability, but taking advantage of that ability requires a larger team size than games on earlier, simpler consoles. In order to compete with the best games on "next generation" consoles, there are more characters to animate; all characters must be modeled with a higher level of detail; more textures must be created; the entire art pipeline must be made more complex to allow the creation of normal maps and more complex programming code is required to simulate physics in the game world, and to render everything as precisely and quickly as possible. With next-generation console games commonly understood to require budgets of US$15 million to $20 million, every game financed is an extremely large gamble, and pressure to succeed is unprecedented in video game history. Nintendo's next-generation console, Wii, is projected to alleviate this problem, to some extent, by concentrating less on the graphics and more on the innovative control.

• When publishing for game consoles, game publishers take on the burden of a great deal of inventory risk. All significant console manufacturers since Nintendo with its NES (1985) have monopolized the manufacture of every game made for their console, and have required all publishers to pay a royalty for every game so manufactured. This royalty must be paid at the time of manufacturing, as opposed to royalty payments in almost all other industries, where royalties are paid upon actual sales of the product—and, importantly, are not payable for games that did not sell to a consumer. So, if a game publisher orders one million copies of its game, but half of them do not sell, the publisher has already paid the full console manufacturer royalty on one million copies of the game, and has to eat that cost.

Christmas or Christmas Day is an annual holiday that marks the traditional birthdate of Jesus of Nazareth. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Marketing Marketing is a social and managerial function that attempts to create, expand and maintain a collection of customers. ... The Xbox 360 is the successor to Microsofts Xbox video game console, developed in cooperation with IBM, ATI, Samsung and SiS. Information on the console first came through viral marketing campaigns and it was officially unveiled on MTV on May 12, 2005, with detailed launch and game information divulged... PlayStation 3 , trademarked PLAYSTATION®3,[8] commonly abbreviated PS3) is Sony Computer Entertainments seventh-generation video game console, third in the PlayStation series. ... A model is a fully-3D computer graphic, polygonal object or character used in computer games. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... In 3D computer graphics, normal mapping is an application of the technique known as bump mapping. ... ISO 4217 Code USD User(s) the United States, the British Virgin Islands, East Timor, Ecuador, El Salvador, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Panama, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the insular areas of the United States Inflation 3. ... The Wii (pronounced as the pronoun we, IPA: ) is the fifth video game console released by Nintendo. ... The Nintendo GameCube is an example of a popular video game console. ... In business management, inventory consists of a list of goods and materials held available in stock. ... NES redirects here. ... 1985 (MCMLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Copyright symbol Copyright is a set of exclusive rights regulating the use of a particular expression of an idea or information. ...

Investor interest

Numerous video game publishers are traded publicly on stock markets. As a group, they have had mixed performance. At present, Electronic Arts is the only third-party publisher present in the S&P 500 diversified list of large U.S. corporations. The New York Stock Exchange A stock market is a market for the trading of company stock, and derivatives of same; both of these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately. ... EA redirects here. ... The S&P 500 is an index containing the stocks of 500 mostly U.S. corporations. ...

Hype over video game publisher stocks has been breathless at two points:

• In the early 1990s when the introduction of CD-ROM computer drives caused hype about a multimedia revolution that would bring interactive entertainment to the masses. All Hollywood movie studios formed "interactive" divisions to profit in this allegedly booming new media. Most of these divisions later folded after expensively producing several games that were heavy in "full-motion video" content, but light in the quality of gameplay.

• In the United States, revenue from the sales of video and computer games exceeded revenue from film box-office receipts for the first time in the dot-com days of the late 1990s, when technology companies in general were surrounded by hype. The video game publishers did not, however, experience the same level of rise in stock prices that many dot-com companies saw. This was probably because video game publishing was seen as a more mature industry whose prospects were fairly well understood, as opposed to the typical exciting dot-com business model with unknown but possibly sky-high prospects. While many technology stocks were eventually destroyed in the dot-com crash in the early 2000's, the stock prices of the video game publishers recovered as a group; several of the larger publishers such as E.A. and Take2 achieved historical highs in the mid-2000's.

Germans dancing on the Berlin Wall in late 1989, the symbol of the cold war divide falls down as the world unites in the 1990s. ... The CD-ROM (an abbreviation for Compact Disc Read-Only Memory (ROM)) is a non-volatile optical data storage medium using the same physical format as audio compact discs, readable by a computer with a CD-ROM drive. ... Technological hype is sensational promotion of technology. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... ... A movie studio is a controlled environment for the making of a film. ... Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. ... Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... Technological hype is sensational promotion of technology. ... Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ...

Selected video game publishers

Below are the top 20 video game publishers, ranked by Game Developer Magazine in September 2005, in order of overall score in six factors: annual turnover, number of releases, average review score, quality of producers, reliability of milestone payments and the quality of staff pay and perks. Note that this is not a ranking by revenue, but of the quality of experience of working with the publishers according to staff, and some video game development companies. Game Developer magazine is a monthly periodical for the video game industry. ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates computer or video games. ...

1. Electronic Arts
2. Activision
3. Nintendo
4. Microsoft Game Studios
5. Sony Computer Entertainment
6. Ubisoft
7. Konami
8. THQ
9. Sega Sammy Holdings
10. Take-Two Interactive
11. Namco
12. Vivendi Universal Games (now Vivendi SA)
13. Atari
14. Olympus Entertainment
15. Capcom
16. Square Enix
17. Bandai Games
18. Codemasters
19. Midway
20. LucasArts

EA redirects here. ... Activision, Inc. ... Nintendo Company, Limited (任天堂 or ニンテンドー Nintendō; NASDAQ: NTDOY, TYO: 7974 usually referred to as simply Nintendo, or Big N ) is a multinational corporation founded on September 23, 1889[1] in Kyoto, Japan by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda cards. ... Microsoft Game Studios (MGS), branded with current logo and moniker in 2002 (formerly the Microsoft Game Division), is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft Corp. ... SCE redirects here. ... Ubisoft Entertainment (formerly Ubi Soft) is a computer and video game publisher and developer with headquarters in Montreuil, France. ... Konami Corporation (コナミ) TYO: 9766 (NYSE: KNM) (SGX: K20) is a leading developer and publisher of numerous popular and strong-selling computer and video games. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ... Namco is a company based in Japan, best known for developing video games. ... Vivendi SA was created in 1998 when Compagnie Générale des Eaux (CGE), a major French industrial and media company, was renamed. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Capcom Co. ... SQUARE ENIX (Japanese: スクウェア・エニックス) is a Japanese producer of popular video games and manga. ... This article is about the Japanese toy manufacturer. ... Codemasters (earlier known as Code Masters) is one of the oldest British video game developers. ... Midway Games (NYSE: MWY) (formerly Midway Manufacturing) is an American video game publisher. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Notable former publishers

• 3DO (console manufacturer) (defunct)
• Acclaim Entertainment
• Accolade (gobbled up by Atari née Infogrames)
• Atari (console manufacturer) (acquired by Infogrames, which then renamed itself Atari)
• Coleco (console manufacturer) (defunct)
• Crystal Dynamics
• Enix (merged with Squaresoft as Square Enix)
• Epyx
• Gathering of Developers (GOD) (Bought by Take-Two Interactive)
• Gremlin Interactive
• GT Interactive
• Hasbro Interactive (acquired by Infogrames)
• Iguana Entertainment
• Imagic
• Infocom (acquired by Activision)
• Interceptor Micros
• Mattel Electronics (console manufacturer)
• Mattel (computer software)
• Melbourne House (computer games and books)
• Microprose (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
• Mindscape, Inc.
• MUSE Software
• Origin Systems (acquired by Electronic Arts)
• Penguin Software
• Psygnosis
• Spectrum Holobyte (acquired by Hasbro Interactive)
• Square Electronic Arts L.L.C. (Owned by Square and Electronic Arts. Folded back into Square Soft, Inc. and changed to Square Enix, Inc.)
• Strategic Simulations, Inc. ("SSI")
• Technos Japan Corporation (defunct) (assets acquired by Atlus)
• Taxan
• US Gold (acquired by Eidos Interactive)
• Virgin Interactive Entertainment

Some of these publishers went out of business; others were purchased or merged with a larger company, and no longer do business under this name, or they exist in name only as a brand. The 3DO Company (formerly THDO on the NASDAQ stock exchange), also known as 3DO, was founded in 1991 under the name SMSG, Inc. ... Acclaim Entertainment was an American video game developer and publisher. ... Accolade was a video game developer and publisher of the 1980s and 1990s. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA) is an international holding company headquartered in Lyon, France. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA) is an international holding company headquartered in Lyon, France. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Coleco (1932 - 1989) was a company founded in 1932 by Maurice Greenberg as Connecticut Leather Company. It became a highly successful toy company in the 1980s, known for its mass-produced version of Cabbage Patch Kids and, to a lesser extent, for its video game consoles Coleco Telstar and ColecoVision. ... Logo Crystal Dynamics is an American video game developer based in the San Francisco Bay area. ... Enix, or more formally Enix Co. ... Square Co. ... SQUARE ENIX (Japanese: スクウェア・エニックス) is a Japanese producer of popular video games and manga. ... Epyx, Inc. ... Gathering of Developers (aka God Games and Gathering) was an American videogame publisher based in Dallas, TX (and then later Austin, TX) founded by a number of independent game developers. ... Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. ... Gremlin Interactive was a British software house based in Sheffield and working mostly on the personal computer and Amiga market. ... GT Interactive was a video game developer founded in 1993 and headquartered in New York City. ... Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the game and toy giant. ... Infogrames Entertainment SA (IESA) is an international holding company headquartered in Lyon, France. ... Iguana Entertainment is a former sports and action game developper and has been credited on the following games: All-Star Baseball Batman Forever: The Arcade Game College Slam Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball NBA Jam NBA Jam 99 NBA Jam Tournament Edition NFL Quarterback Club 97 NFL Quarterback Club 99... Imagic was a third-party maker of games for the Atari 2600 and other early video game consoles in the early 1980s. ... Zork universe Zork games Zork Anthology Zork trilogy Zork I   Zork II   Zork III Beyond Zork   Zork Zero Enchanter trilogy Enchanter   Sorcerer   Spellbreaker Other games Wishbringer   Return to Zork Zork: Nemesis   Zork Grand Inquisitor Zork: The Undiscovered Underground Topics in Zork Encyclopedia Frobozzica Characters   Kings   Creatures Timeline   Magic   Calendar Zorkmid... Activision, Inc. ... Interceptor Micros also known as Interceptor Software (and later as Interceptor Group) was a developer/publisher (mainly of adventure games) for various 8bit and 16bit computer systems popular in Western Europe during the eighties and early nineties. ... Mattel Inc. ... Mattel Inc. ... Melbourne House is a game development studio owned by Atari and based in Melbourne, Australia. ... MicroProse Software, Inc. ... Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the game and toy giant. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Muse Software was a software and computer game publisher and developer for the first generation of home computers. ... Origin Systems, Inc. ... EA redirects here. ... Penguin Software was a video game publisher from Geneva, Illinois that produced games for the Apple II, Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers. ... The cover artwork of most Psygnosis games was by psychedelic artist Roger Dean. ... Spectrum HoloByte, Inc. ... Hasbro Interactive was a video game production and publishing subsidiary of Hasbro, the game and toy giant. ... Square Electronic Arts L.L.C., also known as Square EA, was a joint venture between console video game developers Square Co. ... Square Co. ... EA redirects here. ... Strategic Simulations, Inc. ... Technos Japan Corporation is the defunct Japanese video game publisher that originated the Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-Kun (including River City Ransom) and Double Dragon franchises. ... Atlus is a Japanese computer and video game developer and publisher. ... Taxan is a subsidiary of Kaga Electronics, a Japanese electronics company. ... US Gold was a British computer and video game publisher and developer during the 1980s and 1990s, producing numerous titles on a variety of 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit platforms. ... Eidos Interactive is a publisher of video and computer games based in the United Kingdom. ... Virgin Interactive was a successful and influential British video game publisher. ...

See also

• Console manufacturer
• Independent video game industry
• List of video game publishers