Publishers - What options do we boxers have?

I would like to make a list with all publishers we have available and what their interests and average download rates are. I hope this will help us boxers decide where to go with our hit games.

Company Name | Type of Games Published | Estimated Installs per iOS Game | Contact

The big publishers:
1. Ketchapp | casual games | 60,000 ~ 30,000,000 | http://www.ketchappgames.com/developer.php
2. Fortafy Games | casual games | ~ 100,000,000 (only 1 game published so far) | http://www.fortafygames.com/publishing.html
3. Chillingo | casual games | 100,000 ~ 10,000,000 | http://www.chillingo.com/developers/

The medium publishers:
4. Appsolute Games | casual games | 5,000 ~ 1,000,000 | http://www.appsolutegames.com/
5. Nanovation Labs | casual games | 5,000 ~ 2,500,000 | http://www.nanovationlabs.com/
6. Umbrella Games | casual games | 5,000 ~ 500,000 | http://umbrella.wtf/

The small publishers:
7. Storm Watch Games | casual games | 2,000 - 100,000 | http://stormwatchgames.com/
8. Ayopagames | ? | ? | http://www.ayopagames.com/
9. 6waves | puzzle & strategy games | ? | http://www.6waves.com/
10. Crescent Moon Games | ? | ? | http://crescentmoongames.com/wordpress/publish/
11. 6waves | http://www.6waves.com/
12. NoodleCake | ? | ? | http://www.noodlecake.com/publishing/
13. Spil Games | ? | ? | http://www.spilgames.com/developers/
14. CherryPick Games | ? | ? | http://www.cherrypickgames.com/contact
15. FDG Entertainment | ? | ? | http://www.fdg-entertainment.com/en/support.html
16. Neon Alien Studios | casual games | 50 ~ 1000 | http://www.neonalienstudios.com/contact.html
17. Thumbspire | ? | ? | http://thumbspire.com/submit
18. Kongregate | FTP Games | ? | http://developers.kongregate.com/
19. Armor Games | ? | ? | http://developers.armorgames.com/

RIP:
XX. Buildbox Games | games made with Buildbox | 1,000 ~ 250,000 | https://www.buildbox.com/buildbox-publishing/
XX. Bulkypix | casual games | 10,000 ~ 100,000 | https://bulkypix.com/publishing/

Please help me fill the list if you have more information.

 

I had one with Appsolute Games and my next one will be with Bulkypix.
also I know for a fact NetDoppler guys are interested getting into 1-tap genre.

 

http://www.ayopagames.com/
http://www.6waves.com/
http://www.chillingo.com/
https://bulkypix.com/publishing/
http://crescentmoongames.com/wordpress/publish/

I don't know much about any of these publishers. So you will need to do homework on them.

 

Cherry Pick
Spil Games
NoodleCake
FDG
Kongregate (Not sure about these guys)

 

Thanks for the contribution. 18 publishers so far. What do you guys think?

 

It would be great to understand which ones are best, and in what platforms. Is there any tool we can use that is reliable in terms of download and revenue? I tried sensor towers but honestly I doubt their statistics a little...

 

Revenue is very difficult because it depends on the price and/or the ads (amount, network, etc) and in-app purchase. What for sure would be very interesting is the percentage the publisher takes. But no one talks ever about that. If someone knows people could contact me privately and I add it too the list anonymously.

The download numbers I put to several publishers are taken from their last games in the Appstore. You can check the amount of players in the gamecenter and multiply the number with 2 to get a pretty accurate total for all downloads at this platform. That's how I do it and till now it never failed me once.

 

Interesting and informative, thanks for the post Christoph

 

Why isn't Thumbspire in the list?

http://thumbspire.com/submit

 

Really Good Information. Thanks @Christoph

 

@Christoph Thanks for adding us to the list.
We are up and coming and have a couple of games in the works. Because we are new we offer an extremely fair revenue split plus a bunch of added perks. If anyone is interested please visit http://www.neonalienstudios.com/publishing.html

 

You have repeated some app publishers twice.

 

Do we have to use publishers? How much they take? is it 50% or so!!

 

Ketchapp takes 70%, others take between 40-70%. That's what I heard. I never had a publisher deal so I can't say for sure. The bigger the publisher the more he takes. As usual, if you get 30% of 3 million downloads it's still more or less 1,000,000 downloads for you. If you get 100% of only 1000 downloads, well it's still 1000 at the end.

Do you need a publisher? Not really, but it for sure can help to get you tons of downloads and therefore huge earnings. Publish for yourself if you can't find a publisher or if you already have a very good marketing strategy in place.

 

Wrong assumption. Forgive my tone, but I can not understand why write what you do not know?

Most listed publishers work with 50% revshare. Some of them are flexible and you should always haggle.

 

Not to speak for @Christoph, but it is not an assumption - it is what other members of the forum (that have been active for more than one day) have reported based on their experiences. Forgive my tone as well. That is why he says 'what I heard'

That being said, all things are negotiable but death and taxes (as they say)

 

Oh, I read attentively %).

This is a very important topic for developers and unconfirmed rumors can be very harmful.
I have worked or dealt with most of listed publishers. Maybe I will write some information about some of them.

 

People sharing their experiences is VERY welcome!

 

@Christoph Nice job on starting this list, but good gravy, please remove your estimates. Having just come back from GDC, I met some of the ones you have listed and your numbers are grossly off. I won't say which companies or how off, but just know the numbers are so off that you should not include them in your list. If you are set on listing some sort of numerical stats to help people decide, use the publicly available App Annie data.

One last thing, you can add Storm Watch Games http://stormwatchgames.com/ to your list. We are open to all game categories and have a 100,000 Install guarantee for all games we publish.

 

Not sure what you are suggesting. I only put the numbers for the publishers I researched myself. If you have other information I'll gladly change them but only by saying they are off you don't help much. As said before, this are numbers from the official GameCenter from Apple. You can check them by yourself and what I do afterwards is double them to get to a pretty accurate number of the total downloads. Let's take for example Fortafy. We all know that they surpassed 30 million with Color Switch and the GameCenter says clearly that they have 15 millions of players registered. Double it and you get to 30 million. Normally with that much downloads and after that much time, the percentage gets a little off (more people who are not registered in GameCenter and a lot of people who already deleted the game and the GameCenter stats). So they for sure have more than 30 millions after several weeks still staying strong in the top 10. But I think it doesn't really matter if I get that much into details as we really don't know the exact number anyway. This are estimates to understand in which range you can expect your game to be downloaded if a particular publisher accepts your game. Therefore, I keep this system for now because it always proofed me right. It worked with games from Buildbox Games, with games from independent sources like Dan Counsels Almost Impossible and it worked also with games from Ketchapp. They all behave in the same way. It probably is different for games targeted at hardcore gamers, but for casual gamers and games it IS pretty accurate. Fortunately it still depends on the game and not only on the publisher to guarantee you a certain amount of downloads. That's why Ketchapp, for example, says: 2,000,000 - 20,000,000. A 2 million game is for example Cloud Path and a 20,000,000 game is for example Twist.