Not A Shark Company (NASC), a specialized fractional agency for the video game industry, today announced a strategic expansion designed to address the growing need for high-impact, low-overhead marketing and communications services.
The Paris-based agency’s rapid growth is driven by its core fractional model, which provides direct access to veteran, triple-A-level consultants. It can offer full publishing services, but enables game studios to self-publish their work if they wish, and it concentrates on services such as marketing and comms, said Julien Ramette, CEO at Not A Shark Company, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“We are vouching for more flexible structures in the publishing world,” he said.
NASC’s approach positions the agency as the essential, transparent alternative to expensive full-service firms and costly full-time senior executive hires.
“Not A Shark Company has been built on this idea of fair trade and transparency for publishing,” Ramette said. “We have a very long term vision. We are not running after money and not running after groups. The idea is really to establish something sustainable, long term.”
Fractional value: Premium expertise without the premium overhead
The core of NASC’s model is its efficiency and quality. By operating fractionally, the agency ensures clients only pay for the high-level expertise they need, exactly when they need it. In addition, NASC can operate with various models based on the client’s situation offering a la carte resources for an hourly rate.
“The video game industry, particularly the indie and mid-tier segment, is fiercely competitive, and every marketing dollar counts,” said Ramette. “We founded NASC on the principle of ‘Fractional Value, Full Impact.’ Our consultants are industry veterans with immense experience, meaning our clients get the strategic insight of a head of comms without the typical $200,000+ annual salary and associated overhead. We are here to scale impact, not budgets.”
The company is promising “unmatched services, unquestionable transparency.”
NASC offers planning and execution across the full spectrum of video game publishing:
● Production
● Localisation
● QA
● Release Management
● Live Ops
● Sales
● Business Developement
● Go-to-Market (GTM) Strategy
● Advertisement & Media Planning
● Communication Campaign Management
● Public Relations
● Content Creators Management
In line with its foundational message of Transparency & Trust, NASC operates with clear, defined terms: no hidden costs, clear deadlines, and guaranteed deliverables. This commitment ensures that clients – from indie studio CEOs to Publisher Heads of
Marketing—receive the right service at the right time with unmatched flexibility.
“We are consultants, not budget predators,” added Pierre Chetreff, cofounder of NASC, in a statement. “Our model eliminates the ‘mystery fees’ and retainer lock-ins that plague traditional agency relationships. We believe ethical, clear communication is the most effective strategy, both for our clients’ games and for our own business relationships.”
Not A Shark Company is a specialized boutique publisher providing high-impact strategy,
planning, and execution services exclusively to the video game development and
publishing industries. Leveraging the extensive experience of its veteran consultants,
NASC delivers premium results across public relations, advertising, GTM strategy, and
content creator management, all through a transparent, flexible, and cost-efficient
fractional model.
Origins
Ramette has been in the game industry for 20 years. He started at Atari in the days when they were still working on Unreal Tournament, iniitally as a marketer. He managed distribution for Bandai Namco Games at Atari. Atari collapsed and was acquired by Infogrames in the days when the French stock market was enthusiastic about games.
Not so different from Embracer Group, Infogrames bought too many companies and didn’t survive a big financial crisis.
“When we saw Embracer, I saw that we had lived through the exact same situation. And five years before the collapse of Embracer, we were telling our friends that this would lead to the same situation,” he said. “I’m not proud of predicting it. At least we saw it coming.”
Ramette moved on and served as a brand manager for the Ace Combat series. He also was brand manager for Dark Souls for six years. He did business development for Bandai Namco, offering money to developers in exchange for revenue sharing. He moved over to Ubisoft and managed its external developers. He worked at Wargaming and more recently at Focus Entertainment.
On the publishing side, Ramette said he saw things he didn’t like and he learned that game developers were often paid late and they didn’t have any visibility on the marketing side. He also saw developers building their own publishing teams after they had hits. They often staffed up too much, only to have to few games to market.
“That’s how I came up with this idea of how we can provide you with a service and work on a service basis, like lending you a team in marketing or lending you a team in sales,” he said. “People were excited about this idea.”
Ramette left Focus to pursue this idea and concluded, “Let’s do it ourselves. And let’s not do another shark company.”
A fractional publisher
The company has two full-time people and as many as 25 contractors who can help provide a full 360-degree approach to publishing. Ramette said the talent can cover all of the roles needed for a full-service publisher.
“We didn’t want this corporate bullshit anymore. They didn’t want to spend time in the useless meetings and having the same need to deliver before the end of the fiscal year,” he said. “We have people like me who have 20 years of experience in the industry. They can do freelance work in various roles. We really good people who started giving their service as freelancers. We realized we had a publishing team.”
Often, he said, developers turn to publishers to do crucial marketing six months before the release of a game because they’ve ignored it until it’s late. They can also you production services to help finish the game.
Ramette said his company can build custom teams for studios to publish or sell a game.
“We don’t see ourselves as a revolution. We don’t see ourselves as a replacement publisher. We really see ourselves as a flexibility solution, an in-between solution,” Ramette said.
The company has been operating for around three years and it has about 120 clients to date. Revenues from invoicing is going up year over year.
Instead of having too many people at a publisher, maybe it’s better to have a smaller team and externalize some of the resources.
“The idea is really to be a complementary solution,” he said. “We believe there should be more flexible structures in the publishing world. I think the future is to have a publisher with five or ten people, and then external resources.”
The second focus is on media buying. Ramette’s cofounder, Pierre Chetreff, comes from mobile user acquisition, and he was disappointed that there was very little attribution, or good sources of information for attribution, or crediting which ad is responsible for adding a given high-value user, in the PC world compared to mobile.
So Chetreff focused on developing a service for that kind of business to make sure marketing dollars are well spent with proper tracking.
And then the company does business development, trying to help developers with creating their pitch materials, scouting for investors, publishers and distributors and negotiating contracts.
“We are very proud of having created this because on one side, the freelancers are super happy, because these were people who didn’t want to go back to the corporate world and were a bit afraid of not having enough work. We do a good job in feeding them every month with a new project. And at the same time, they have the liberty to work as they want, when they want,” he said. “At the same time, we have very positive feedback from clients because they have fast response times.”
Sharks?
I asked if there are too many sharks in game publishing. That commentary is in the name of Ramette’s company, but he doesn’t think there are too many sharks. He thinks there are too many companies with structural issues. If you get investors who want a certain profit margin, that puts pressure on the business.
“I think it’s just a problem of the way the company is organized,” he said.
By contrast, Not A Shark Company focuses on hitting a 10% margin, which is relatively low. But he thinks he can do it with a flat organization and fewer investors in the mix.
“We bootstrap the company so that we don’t have any pressure when it comes to how much margin we need to get, and to make sure that the value goes to first the client and the workers,” he said.
Ramette said his people get 90% of the proceeds, and because of that, they are loyal. Other publishers will take 50% of the proceeds, sometimes without earning it.
Ramette hopes to get new clients at the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco for the week of March 9. He wants to meet publishers and investors he can connect with clients who are still looking for funding. And he hopes to find new freelance workers who “want to change the industry,” he said.
The state of the industry
I asked him his thoughts about Microsoft’s Xbox leadership transition to put his analysis skills to the test.
“I’m not going to give you a corporate talk here. I think the Xbox strategy has been destroying the industry for a long time because of Game Pass. It’s a good idea. I mean, everyone thinks it’s cool to get games for 10 bucks, and I won’t go against that. But the problem is it’s devaluing the value of games. When you have games that cost several millions, that are free on Game Pass, that brings the value down. You can maybe get it for $1 and renew your subscription every month.”
He also noted that Steam is a great platform, but it’s also pushing discounts heavily.
“In the last 10 years, we have created systems in the industry that have pushed the value of products down,” he said. “My problem today is, and I think that’s a big problem of the industry, is this. How do you justify paying a professional team of paid workers when they are in competition with studios who are not paid for three years?”
“When you look at the portfolio of Microsoft, how do you sustain this level of teams?” he said. “It’s no surprise a couple of months ago they raised prices. I’m not surprised by the fact that the management team had to change because the financial pressure on them is too big.”
And by extension, Ramette isn’t a fan of Microsoft’s replacement Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, in part because of her expertise in AI.
“I think it’s a bad decision because the console ecosystem is built on quality and doesn’t accept AI. So I think that would be problematic,” he said. “The former management team was really pro gamer. They were going in the right direction. But was it sustainable? It’s complicated.”
“My objective is not to replace publishers. It’s more to become an in-between solution, and I think the market needs to have several solutions to adapt to the new world,” Ramette said.