There are some opening in our schedules and we are looking to publish some extra titles. So basically, if you are interested in Freeverse publishing your game, let me know. bruce at freeverse dot com We offer a few different payment structures depending on your needs.
For those of us who are not intimately familiar Freeverse, can you briefly describe what you offer, and in return for what? Thanks Ryan
Sure, Freeverse was founded in 1994 as a Mac Shareware company. It wasn't long before the company grew into a Retail software development studio. There were not many Mac publishing outlets, so Freeverse decided to self publish and had great success. We then branched out into more publishing. In 2003 we got into Xbox 360 development. We have 3 released titles for XBLA, and a 4th in late development. When the iPhone was announced we invested a lot into development so when the SDK dropped we were ready with a pipeline and several titles. Shortly after we brought our partners, Strange Flavour on board with the iPhone. They made Plank, Flick Fishing and SlotZ Racer, which I don't have to tell you are highly successful games. What we have to offer: 1. Technical knowledge and assistance. We have libraries and code we make available to our partners 2. Artwork and Creative Resources. Sometimes, like in the case of Strange Flavour we might help by doing some of the artwork. Or in the case of SlotZ Racer we built the server that enables track sharing. 3. Deep integration of Freeverse's name, website and other buzz words. When we publish a title, we full on support it and integrate it into our company. This means we advertise it fully, we work to ensure it's promoted on our website, other websites and in iTunes. 4. Developer love and support. We love our devs and keeping them happy and healthy and making money is our goal. When we publish a title, you become part of our family and we look after family. 5. Lastly we are approachable and reasonable. We are a self owned company, so there's little to no red tape. We can go from idea to execution of that idea in a matter of hours. A few of the mac titles we have published: Comic Life Deluxe for plasq Sound Studio 3 for FeltTip Legion Arena for Slitherine Heroes of Might and Magic V for Ubisoft Aibrust Extreme & Toysight for Strange Flavour Hordes of Orcs for MrJoy I'm always available to talk more one on one with any thing you might want to know.
I think publishing with Freeverse is a good deal. Glad to hear you are looking for people. I'm getting my MacBook soon and will try to make an app. Maybe I'll come to you guys (if I actually learn the coding).
Would you guys mind mailing me some of your payment structure and general benefit of publishing with freeverse?
Grumps, The best is for you to drop me an email so we can discuss your needs and such. No two devs are the same, so our publishing efforts very from dev to dev (in their favor).
I think we all recognize what a good publisher can do for a game, however there is practically no info on what that cost is to the developer. Apple are very up front that they take 30%. I see no reason why publishers shouldn't be as transparent with their terms. Please feel free to post a ballpark figure.
I'll chime in here as one of the devs that Freeverse is currently publishing. We've been with them for 5 years (Strange Flavour Ltd's 5th birthday is on April 1st!) since they helped us quit our day jobs writing console games at big company to set our own company up writing our own games. We've gone from success to success with an Apple Design Award for ToySight (a game that's inspired several top iPhone games and apps it seems ), successful XBLA projects and 2 top selling iPhone games with Flick Fishing and SlotZ Racer. And that's with just 2 of us here, working from home in the UK with Freeverse giving us full support from the US. They're a great team and for a small company punch well above their weight while still keeping a small team attitude and writing games for fun as well as the profit. They're also very positive in letting us go with our knowledge and skills and pick what projects we want to do rather than pushing us to do license projects or "whatever's currently selling". I can thoroughly recommend Freeverse as publishers to any game developer.
I don't fully understand the offer here. If I have a code made on C++ windows visual would you be able to make that into an app for me?
No, it's for devs who are writing games and want a more fully featured publishing deal (promotion, QA support, cross platform deals, bigger brand awareness etc.). If you've got a good Windows game already and think it might make a good iPhone title then it may still be worth contacting Freeverse but if it's one you want to write for the iPhone then you'll still have to do the normal iPhone dev process (Mac + XCode).
Think of this like publishing a book. You make it, they advertise, sell it, deal with management of it all, and get a cut of the profits so you don't have to. It is almost always more successful than self publishing.
To clear things up. We do look at concept art and game design pitches. We have one project that we played a demo of the game on a different platform and we are funding the iPhone development. The reason I'm not throwing out numbers is it really does change from dev to dev. Let's say you have a 9 to 5 and a steady paycheck. An advance on sales does you little good, as you don't need money right now. So for someone in that position, we would structure our a royalty spit thats appropriate for the developer and the game. Some of our the titles we have published have come to us with a finished title. In that case, there's not much Freeverse has left to do, so we work out something that's appropriate to the effort put in. But other developers come to us with little more than a tech demo. Then we offer up code support, artwork, testing, fit and finish. The structure of that deal will be different. I'm really not trying to be obscure of shy about the process. We really want to look after our developers and ensure they are getting the best for them. We are also after long commitments rather than wham-bam-thank you mam. We like working with the same developers over many years like in the case of Strange Flavour. EDIT: We like to work with either smaller studios or developers who are a complete solution. The reason is because we tend to let people do what they want to do, we find we get better quality if they get to make the game they wanted to make, rather than force them to make something they don't enjoy.
OK, thanks for the reply. I'll get my current game a bit further down the line, and then maybe drop you a line and see what you think
Does Freeverse offer any porting services? Say an iPhone title is successful today, but the Android turns out to be the platform of the future. Does Freeverse have an facilities to port code to a new platform?
Gillygize, for inquiries about other platforms, please contact me direct, bruce at freeverse dot com.
