MTV’s Multiplayer ran a week’s worth of posts about the state of reviewing in the games industry. I feel like this is actually some good journalism, something I wish that there was more of in the gaming press.

Between the MTV stuff, and Level Up’s Reflections on videogame publisher and employer contempt towards the enthusiast press there’s a lot of very good material for people to think about the very broken status of the enthusiast press and review mechanisms of the industry.

When your industry is still in its infancy and at the same time in the midst of a distribution revolution, it’s worth casting your eye around to see how the others are getting along. I did it once already with the comics industry and now’s a good time to talk books.

David Edery (the Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner for XBLA) recently announced that he’s just about finished writing his first book. He paints a grim picture of his prospects.

From what I’ve gathered, less than 1% of published books turn out to be hits. The odds for a first-time author (who isn’t a big name, like Bill Clinton or Alan Greenspan) are so incredibly low that even if your publisher loves your book, your marketing/sales forecast is unlikely to exceed 20k copies at best. At that level, it simply doesn’t make sense for the publisher to do much in the way of marketing until the book has already proven itself.

The parallels (hit-driven) are as striking as the contrasts (so we publish a lot of books but only market some of them). It’s worth considering how publishers in the two industries might have come up with opposite solutions that to the hit-driven problem.

My working theory is that books are cheap to write but expensive to distribute, while games are expensive to make but approaching free to hand out.

So book publishers (or at least, ours) have adapted to their harsh reality, and have forced authors to be more self-reliant. We received a huge “marketing questionnaire,” with questions like “What is the big idea of the book,” “Why now is a good time to publish it,” “Why will people want to read it,” and “Who will buy it and why? Be realistic!” The questionnaire forced us to think about competing books and explain our points of differentiation. It forced us to think through every possible personal contact who could help promote the book, directly or indirectly, through coverage or endorsements, etc. We had to list every website, magazine, and journal that might be interested in the book. We had to answer a list of theoretical questions from journalists. We had to create sound bites. We were asked if we’d be willing to maintain a blog or podcast, and were offered help setting those up. And more.

Edery argues that every publisher of an indie arcade title should require their developers to fill out this type of marketing questionnaire. I’d take it a step further: if the services that publishers provide keep getting cut back like this because of the economics, why have a publisher at all? Developer royalties tend to be awful, but this makes a kind of sense if the publisher is doing the bulk of the heavy lifting with the financing and marketing. Without that support, giving away more than half of your income on the game makes very little sense.

The question as an indie that you need to ask is: will the boost in sales that having a publisher provides outweigh the cost in the portion of income that they take. If you negotiate 50% royalties with a publisher (how’d you do that?), this better be because you expect their support to more than double your sales. If you have a 15% royalty rate, then you are expecting the publisher to improve your sales nearly sevenfold. If your situation is “game gets a publisher or never gets to market” then sure, go for it. But in the land of indie downloadable games, we live in a era of abundance marketing, where publishing your work costs roughly the price of buying domain hosting.