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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Analysis and Opinion   >   Opinion   >   A write up of my World of Love talk

A write up of my World of Love talk

By on June 29, 2010

I made a 20 minute talk at World of Love about permission. More importantly, I said that you no longer need permission to publish a game.

I didn’t need permission to publish How to Publish a Game. I just went ahead and did it. You can do the same with games.

I didn’t have slides or notes. I’m sufficiently passionate about self-publishing games that I just talk. But luckily for me, Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun provided a massive write-up of World of Love. He summarised my talk like this:

“The business ball was not dropped by the next chap along, who was Nicholas Lovell, the man behind a blog on the business of games, and author of a book called “How To Publish A Game”. He wanted to urge indies to pay attention to the business side of their work, because he saw it as the greater part of their capacity to get stuff sold. Worth remembering that 80% of the cost of Modern Warfare 2, which was the best selling game of last year, was advertising, distribution and so on, said Lovell. And this was key to his point: the internet means that you no longer need to ask for permission to make a game. Anyone can do it. In Lovell’s case, he hadn’t needed to ask permission to write a book. He just did it and then self-published. That’s what the internet has allowed us to do with games. To create and to distribute without another party. But this creates a massive additional responsibility for creators, because they still need to ship, to sell, which was something that was previously the responsibility of publishers. Understanding that, and dealing with it, will be the difference between standing up on that podium and talking about your success at a future event, or ending up working on quite a different industry.”

They even dropped in a picture of me gesticulating wildly at Simon Oliver of Rolando fame.

Go check out the full report on Rock Paper Shotgun. There was a lot of inspirational stuff there.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com