14 DAY TRIAL // During the DICE 2012 conference organized in Las Vegas, Michael Pachter, who is an analyst watching the video game industry, has argued that the current publishing system for video games is broken and that more of the companies handling these duties might disappear in the coming years.
[ADMARk=1]Speaking at the event organized by the Academy Of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the analyst stated, “I think publishers were great in the 80s and 90s when consumers didn't understand what games were.” He then added that the current development of digital distribution was making publishers irrelevant as more companies could get the games to their fans directly, with no middlemen.
Pachter also said that “I think you're going to end up with a lot more companies like THQ. I think it's interesting that in the last eight years, we lost Acclaim, 3DO, Eidos, Midway. What new publishers have emerged? Yeah, Chillingo, Playfish, but they're not the same.”
THQ has recently announced that it was focusing on core gaming properties because of the failure of its uDraw tablet and that it was seeking a partner that could deliver the resources needed to bring its ambitious Dark Millennium Online MMO to the market in 2013.
The Wedbush Morgan analyst also highlighted the fact that Activision, one of the biggest publishers on the market, was basically relying just on two franchises, the MMO World of Warcraft and the first person shooter Call of Duty, for revenue and profit.
Jesse Divnich, who is an analysts working at market research firm EEDAR, argued against Pachter’s point, saying that the current model was still working and that companies fail because they make bad decisions and not because of the constraints of the publisher model.
He believes that Activision, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft and their peers play an important role in scouting for innovative video games ideas and in providing the resources that developers need to turn them into critical and commercial hits.