Marketing & Costs

Marketing is part of the deal. So is the invoice.

In a full-service publishing deal, the publisher handles your marketing. That bill usually comes out of your share, and you often have no say in how large it gets.

One of the things that makes full-service publishing genuinely attractive is the marketing. You're a small team. You make games. You probably don't have a PR network, a community team, or a working relationship with Valve. The publisher does. That's real value.

What's less obvious until the royalty statement arrives is that in most full-service deals, the marketing done on your behalf is fully recoverable from your revenue share. The publisher spends 50,000 euros on your launch campaign. That 50,000 goes into the recoupment pool alongside your advance and any service costs. You pay it back out of your side before any split revenue reaches you.

This isn't inherently wrong. Marketing costs money. Publishers take on real financial risk by spending before the game launches. The structure becomes a problem when there's no cap on what the publisher can spend, and you have no approval mechanism for individual decisions.

The part no one explains until later

An uncapped recoverable marketing budget with sole publisher discretion means the publisher can decide what your game needs and spend accordingly. You're not in the room. You see the royalty statement.

I've watched this play out in both directions. Sometimes the publisher's spending was genuinely effective and made the game's launch better than the studio could have managed alone. Sometimes the budget was spent in ways the developer found questionable and had no contractual way to challenge. The contract determines which of those situations you're in before you even know it matters.

A few things worth getting into the contract specifically: a defined or capped marketing budget, ideally as a number rather than a category. Some form of written approval right on large individual expenditures, a threshold above which you have to be consulted. And the question of what percentage of marketing costs are actually recoverable. Some publishers absorb a portion of marketing risk rather than passing 100% back through the recoupment pool. The range varies a lot across deals and it's worth asking about directly.

Pricing and discount strategy

Pricing is another area that tends to get overlooked until it's a source of friction. Who sets the sale price? Who decides when the game goes on discount, and by how much? Who controls key distribution and what the threshold for a bundle deal looks like?

These feel like operational questions. They become commercial ones when you disagree on strategy, or when a heavy discount cycle starts affecting the game's baseline perceived value in ways you never agreed to. The contract usually says something about this. It's worth knowing what before you're in that conversation.

The goal isn't to do the publisher's job for them. It's to be a participant in decisions that affect your revenue and your game's position in the market, before those decisions are made rather than after.