During the offline event for Gamescom Asia 2022, we had the opportunity to attend a panel on the agenda of How Game Publishing is Evolving, as game industry leaders shed some light over what is the role of game publishers.

The panelist consists of Guilaume Jamet – Vice President and Head of Publishing of Plug in Digital / Dear Villager, Jungwon Hahn – CEO of Majamojo, Simon Alty – Vice President & Managing Director of Bethesda / ZeniMax and Christopher Liu – Director Game Investments of VNG Corporation.

The discussion is lead and moderated by Erick Ford – Vice President-Asia Pacific of Take-Two Interactive.

During the panel, the panelist talked about how making a game isn’t just about focusing on developing the game, but publishing it as well. While some of the game makers have decided to take on the responsibility to publisher their games by themselves, there are also some developers who rely on game publishers to publish the games for them.

For Simon Alty, the role of a publisher has always been the same for him, which is to tell a story and help the studio to find a place for their games. To which Guilaume Jamet has a similar thinking to it, stating that maximising the game’s chances to be successful is their job.

Jungwon Hahn thinks thinks that a publisher should be the arms and legs of the developers, constantly providing them valuable information regarding things such as different needs, payment options as well as business models. All of these information are essential to help developers find a market that fits the games.

Christopher Liu however thinks that if you’re solely a publisher, there’s not much that awaits you in the future, and that when they sign a game for publishing purposes, they will send over a team to help the developer out.

The gaming industry has been around for a long time, and as time passes, the role of a publisher also changes. Jungwon Hahn states that the biggest difference between now and then is that everything now can be tracked. Developers can know what is happening to your game, why it succeeded and why it failed.

Publishers won’t just accept any pitches from the game developer, all of them have different ideas when they are evaluating game developers. While Guilaume Jamet values the passion and ambitions of the team more, Christopher Liu and Jungwon Hahn would like to have a team that can adapt to the new market’s needs and also keep up with the trends.

In different parts of the world, there are different markets and working cultures, but the distance might not be that far away. Christopher Liu noticed that even within China, developers from two different cities are completely different.

One of the examples being that developers from Beijing would be focusing more on QA, while those who are from Shanghai would be focusing more on the esports scenes and mobile games.

Jungwon Hahn chimed in with his opinion where the business model that the markets prefer has one of the biggest differences. While pay-to-win games are more acceptable here, if you would to try the same thing in places like the United States or in Europe, it would cause a lot of problems.

However, Guilaume Jamet thinks that it’s within the mindset of the developers that has the greatest difference between two parts of the world. He felt that the studios here in SEA are a little bit too shy, and not trying to go as far as they can with their projects.

Developers have great potential to do great things, but Guilaume Jamet would have to push the developers a little harder just to make them take the steps forward.