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Mary-Margaret #5: "Licensing issues"
"My team and I have spent two years building several add-on modules for a well-known strategy game, using the game's built-in editor. We think it's better than anything the publisher has done before, but apparently the sales of the previous add-ons were disappointing, and the publisher isn't very interested in publishing our product directly. But there's a possibility we can get a license from them so a third-party publisher could publish it. How should we proceed with this? - Freelancing in Florida What you're dealing with here are two separate problems. One is convincing the publisher that they should license your add-on and allow it to be released into the marketplace as a commercial product, with the resulting risks to value of the game franchise should it not be successful. The second is finding a company to publish your module as a commercial product. Your biggest problem is that people constantly release modules like this for free download on the Internet. So you're not just competing against other commercial developers, but everyone who has the spare time to build something similar in a level editor. Your module is going to have to be pretty spectacular to compete against free downloads. It's possible that a smaller publisher might be interested in working with you to secure the license and then publish the product, or a rackware company (the folks who sell $5 games at CompUSA). I would suggest that you target folks like that as your potential publisher. A large company that directly competes with this publisher's A-list titles is not going to have any interest in something like this. You should contact the primary publisher and get specific terms for a licensing deal, so that when you approach a third-party publisher, you have all the necessary information on hand. But I don't think you should be overly optimistic about this.... you've got a lot of obstacles between you and a publishing deal. In the
future, if at all possible, I'd recommend doing your speculative work
on original project prototypes so there's no risk of the intellectual
property copyright holder denying you the ability to make money off
your hard creative work. The fact that you've invested two years of
effort in a product that may not be salable is a heart-breaking situation.
I hope this works out ________________________________________________________ |
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