Trend watch: the rise of 'publisher as a service'?

gamedeveloper.com:

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Well, time for another week in the firing line of this here ‘interactive video game industry’ that we all seem to have signed up for. First time? Worry ye not, we’re here to help navigate you through it all.

Oh, we got ‘borderline praise’ for our last music mix suggestion, so here’s a neat one: ‘Sounds On Screen: Techno Thrillers’, “two hours of electronica, IDM, and indie rock from the soundtracks of 1980s + '90s techno thriller films, featuring music from The Matrix, Hackers, eXistenZ and more.” (Found via Read Max.) Let’s go do some growth ‘hacking’!

So, there are two choices in making games as a developer - ‘get a publisher’, or ‘don’t get a publisher’, right? And if you don’t get a publisher, you (maybe) have to hire a PR agency or something… right? Well, maybe. But it’s a lot more complex than that.

In fact, publishers offer a multi-faceted set of services. And in our view, it’s been difficult to hire in service companies to bridge the divide. Sure, you can get firms to help you with social media and PR. But some forward-thinking PR/marketing agencies are starting to go significantly beyond that.

Exhibit A: popagenda, the boutique agency which - sure - does PR (for Cuphead, Grindstone, Landfall, Ooblets, the Playdate & more.) But it does more than that. For example, for the recently released (and excellent!) Nobody Saves The World from Drinkbox, popagenda did “Marketing Strategy, Release Management, PR, Social, Trailers.”

What’s notable in there (besides ‘Marketing Strategy’) is ‘Release Management’. This means