I’ve made a bunch of indie games over the last 15+ years and have had my fair share of dealings with publishers, and I’ve also heard a LOT about publishers through other indies in private channels. Talking to publishers is one of the things I get the most questions about, even from developers I would consider pretty established, and I realize that part of the reason for this is that there’s just so little information out there about that side of game development. So I wanted to talk a bit through what I know about indie games publishing in the hopes that it will help people out there to navigate the space.
This will not include information about specific publishers or deals to keep people’s info confidential. I’m only going to go over the absolute basics; every developer-publisher relationship has unique circumstances.