If you’re looking for an exciting new game, a GIF is a useful tool. If a game looks cool in a short, animated format, I can investigate further to see if it’s something I actually want to buy. And all of that holds true for publishing games as well. On the latest episode of How Games Make Money, Irregular Corporation publishing director Stuart Morton says that a cool GIF is often one of the first things he looks for from potential development partners.
On this week’s episode of How Games Make Money, Morton elaborates on why a GIF is important. He also talks about how Irregular Corporation is building a relationship with a community of developers and fans in the simulation/strategy scene on PC. You can hear all of that and more during Morton’s conversation with me, How Games Make Money host Jeff Grubb. Listen below or in the YouTube player at the top of the page.
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Finding GIFs and gaming scenes
During our conversation, I asked Morton what he’s looking for from games as a publisher.
“An interesting GIF is always a good start, for sure,” Morton said. “An interesting GIF is one of the main things that will catch my eye and start me off on the trail of kind of digging into what the game is to see if it might be of interest to us. So that is one of the biggest points for me when I’m looking for potential new games.”
We are almost 11k builders strong over on our PC Building Simulator Discord channel 💪
Chat with folks who love RGB builds as much as you do 👇https://t.co/kIDuW6I8jf pic.twitter.com/RG9RUxDzUp
— PC Building Sim (@PCBuildingSim) May 19, 2020
But obviously that’s only one potential beginning of the process. Irregular Corporation is responsible for games like PC Building Simulator, Balsa Model Flight Sim, and Mars Horizon. These are all simulation games, but Morton says it’s solely about finding games that are trying to simulate a concept. It’s important to find games that are touching on appealing subjects.
“For us, there’s a lot of value in games that have extra interest outside of the pure games,” said Morton. “Games that have a real world application or hobby attached to them are really interesting to us as a publisher. That’s where we can really see good coverage of users outside of games that we can hopefully reach with those titles.”
Operating within these scenes has its advantages. Audiences care about simulating a space agency, but that often means Irregular Corporation can find developers already working on content for those people.
“There’s a lot of passion around the kind of genres that we work within,” said Morton. “People that make simulation games often really love whatever the subject matter is for that game, and it’s going to reach even bigger communities outside of games. PC Building Simulator is a great example of that.”
You can hear more from Morton in our full interview above.