Don't be too surprised that Chillingo is releasing so many games so quickly. It's important to note that they do not actually DEVELOP the games, they publish, which is a whole other business of there own. They are like ngmoco. Chillingo released Zen Bound, which I believed was developed by Secret Exit. ngmoco regrets passing up the decision to publish Zen Bound, but now they are working with those developers.
No ngmoco has(so far) developed all their games they were just asked to to publish a game, but refused for whatever reason(maybe too much hassle with all their games that they are up to). An example is that look at Zenbound's page and where you see "Seller" it will show "Chillingo copyright SecretExit" while when you look at every single ngmoco game it says under "Seller" it says ngmoco copyright ngmoco. There's more games like that but this is an easy example. But just to be clear and reiterate ngmoco are the developers of their own game while Chillingo are publishers. Is the reason people don't publish their own game is because of the legal problems and the didn't purchase the SDK? Or is their different reasons, because I don't see why you can't just publish your own games, their must be something im missing...
Except a small game you might have heard of called Rolando. That's by Hand Circus, with ngmoco as publisher. Marketing. --Eric
Ah, I thought there was one, but I guess I wasn't paying enough attention when I was looking through their games, thanks.
Actually, ngmoco is a large publishing entity and developer. Rolando was developed by Hand Circus. TouchPets is being developed by Stumptown Games (Located a few blocks from me.) They are working with Secret Exit right now for another game. Here is a quote from this article I found on this subject: http://venturebeat.com/tag/congmoco/ "Internally, Ngmoco employs 26 people, but it farms out game development to smaller studios so that 50 or 60 people are working on games now. Young said the company was ahead of its business plan but declined to disclose whether the firm was profitable. Tim Chang of Norwest will join Ngmocos board." Not that ngmoco having other people do the work is a bad thing. It allows them to work on many projects and ensure the quality.
In regards to having other companies publish the games of the development team: Publishers finance and commission the development of other games. They inject the necessary capital for a development to focus their efforts on the game (publisher pays for salaries, wages, tools, etc.) and the development does the actual development. Publisher is also responsible for the marketing and public relations.
