Post by leunas on Oct 12, 2006 12:02:25 GMT -5
My Dad was Ian Ballantine's lawyer.
You probably don't know who Ian Ballantine was, but you should.
Ian Ballatine practically created paperback publishing in the United States. He began with Penguin USA, bringing the British publisher's innovative line of paperbacks to the US.
Then he founded Bantam Books.
And then Ballantine Books (now a division of Random House, I mean, Bertelsmann USA).
And not incidentally (for me and for many of you, I suspect), Ballatine Books was the first major US publisher to publish novel-length science fiction--and his wife, Betty Ballantine, was the first major editor of book-length science fiction, and had a big role in bringing the genre to mass market attention.
I'm mentioning this because of my last post; I think there are some dramatic similarities to what happened in paperback publishing, and what is going to happen in digital distribution of games.
You see, the boilerplate contract that every publisher used back in the 50s and early 60s--in other words, when there was no such thing as paperback publishing--said that the publisher controlled subsidiary rights, and that the author would receive 50% of the proceeds from the sale of such rights.
This meant that when paperbacks appeared, paperback publishers had to go to the conventional hardcover publishers, and make deals. They'd pay something for the rights to the book, and the author got 50%, and the hardcover publisher got 50%.
This didn't last long.
Agents quickly awoke to the fact that hardcover publishers were in the business of publishing hardcovers--and you could pretty easily sell the hardcover rights to one publisher, and the paperback rights to another, and keep 100% of both sales.
That, of course, led to the consolidation of publishing, with companies merging so they had both paperback and hardcover divisions in the same firm, and could bid on both rights at once.
What we're seeing in games at the moment is a legacy issue; digital distribution didn't exist up until recently. So conventional publishers control those rights, and want a piece of it, and the end result is that the developer is at the end of a chain that's even longer than the value chain for conventional retail, and wind up with even less of the pie.
I believe--or at least, like to think--that developers will realize that they don't have to settle for this--that if a conventional publisher wants a game, they want it because they think they can achieve a reasonable ROI through conventional distribution channels, and the smaller amount they might earn through digital distribution isn't germane. And that you can extract digital distribution from those negotiations, and sell digital rights to someone else for more money.
Not that we have a lot of upfront money to spend right now.
But on the other hand, we offer 60% of the consumer dollar. Not 6.3%; not 9%. Six zero. An actual majority.
Oh brave new world, that has such deal terms in it.
Non-ironically, this time.
www.costik.com/weblog/2006/10/shift-to-digital-and-paperback.html
You probably don't know who Ian Ballantine was, but you should.
Ian Ballatine practically created paperback publishing in the United States. He began with Penguin USA, bringing the British publisher's innovative line of paperbacks to the US.
Then he founded Bantam Books.
And then Ballantine Books (now a division of Random House, I mean, Bertelsmann USA).
And not incidentally (for me and for many of you, I suspect), Ballatine Books was the first major US publisher to publish novel-length science fiction--and his wife, Betty Ballantine, was the first major editor of book-length science fiction, and had a big role in bringing the genre to mass market attention.
I'm mentioning this because of my last post; I think there are some dramatic similarities to what happened in paperback publishing, and what is going to happen in digital distribution of games.
You see, the boilerplate contract that every publisher used back in the 50s and early 60s--in other words, when there was no such thing as paperback publishing--said that the publisher controlled subsidiary rights, and that the author would receive 50% of the proceeds from the sale of such rights.
This meant that when paperbacks appeared, paperback publishers had to go to the conventional hardcover publishers, and make deals. They'd pay something for the rights to the book, and the author got 50%, and the hardcover publisher got 50%.
This didn't last long.
Agents quickly awoke to the fact that hardcover publishers were in the business of publishing hardcovers--and you could pretty easily sell the hardcover rights to one publisher, and the paperback rights to another, and keep 100% of both sales.
That, of course, led to the consolidation of publishing, with companies merging so they had both paperback and hardcover divisions in the same firm, and could bid on both rights at once.
What we're seeing in games at the moment is a legacy issue; digital distribution didn't exist up until recently. So conventional publishers control those rights, and want a piece of it, and the end result is that the developer is at the end of a chain that's even longer than the value chain for conventional retail, and wind up with even less of the pie.
I believe--or at least, like to think--that developers will realize that they don't have to settle for this--that if a conventional publisher wants a game, they want it because they think they can achieve a reasonable ROI through conventional distribution channels, and the smaller amount they might earn through digital distribution isn't germane. And that you can extract digital distribution from those negotiations, and sell digital rights to someone else for more money.
Not that we have a lot of upfront money to spend right now.
But on the other hand, we offer 60% of the consumer dollar. Not 6.3%; not 9%. Six zero. An actual majority.
Oh brave new world, that has such deal terms in it.
Non-ironically, this time.
www.costik.com/weblog/2006/10/shift-to-digital-and-paperback.html