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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

I agree. Lower operation costs, no need to pay all those worthless sack of shit suits and manager cunts.

90% of paid salaries will be to people who contribute to sound, code, graphics and other things that is shipped.

I'm starting to get tired of this 'we don't need no suits' talk on HN. You need a marketing strategy, regardless of how good your game is.

Publishers have the know how and capital to devise and implement such a strategy. Don't make the mistake to assume that they are just there to take a cut of your profits without putting any value on the table.

You don't need a marketing strategy, you need somebody who knows pr, since you can't afford to pay for ads anyway.that person shouldn't be in a suit.

Marketing is way more than just ads and PR.

Yeah, there's a lot of talk but not many successful examples to make up for the speech. What has actually come out of Kickstarter yet? Not much. And most of the game-related projects are super late. Mmmm.

I am not sure that developers without publisher pressure is ACTUALLY a good thing. Sometimes you need constraints to do good work.

Well, games with publisher pressure are often late as well and/or released half-finished, so that's not a shining example of a business layer making a real difference.

Strong words but you also need somebody to make sure it all comes together and actually ships.

That's true but there is a middle ground, and it's not like indie developers can't get it together and ship great code without being massive. A good recent example that gets thrown around here is the new Tomb Raider, where first month sales of ~3.5 million were underwhelming because the game cost so much to make (and/or was meant to subsidize Square-Enix's other recent failures). Compare that to something like Braid or Journey, which obviously aren't games of the same scope as Tomb Raider but they're quality, highly rated games made by a fraction of the people.

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