Lace Mamba swindling Amanita Design, Colibri and Daedelic out of profits

[theSynapse]

Considering that Lace Mamba was a sponsor/contributor to the first AdventureX, plus our collective love of adventure games, I thought this might be of interest to many of you:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakubDvorsky/20130211/186420/Indies_vs_Mamba_Games_and_Lace_Mamba_Global.php

TL;DR - Lace Mamba illegally distributed games in territories where it had no licence, didn't pay royalties, didn't pay minimum guarantees to companies involved. Those companies being Colibri (Tiny Bang), Amanita Design (Machinarium, Samarost etc.) and Daedelic (Whispered World series).

A strong warning for indie devs to be careful of who they sign with. Anyone here thinking about using Lace Mamba as a publisher? Ditch them ASAP.

[CaptainD]

I think a lot of us were considering using them and have decided against approaching them.  I'd heard rumours before CBE Software issued a press release announcing they had cancelled their agreement with Lace Mamba and why - I have since seen on GameBoomers that Lace Mamba's European Managing Director has resigned.  I think it will take a very long time before they can try to establish themselves as someone indie developers will want to have dealings with again (if ever).

[Azure]

It's kind of sad, there are not many publishers willing to put boxed adventure games out. Then again I wonder if it's really viable if this kinda mess occurs?

[theSynapse]

I would say the days of boxed adventure games (apart from Kickstarter extras like with the Double Fine Adventure) are over. Commercially, adventure games are not going to sell enough to warrant putting them in boxes and putting them in shops.

Making hard copies and distributing them from your own base of operations (like WadjetEye have done with some limited edition bits) of course, is a different matter.

If triple-A games are finding it hard to turn a profit in shops (and they REALLY are!), then a niche genre like ours can't possibly hope to do any better.

[m0ds]

It's a shame! Even more so when it's an entity that helped you out sometime.

[Anian]

If triple-A games are finding it hard to turn a profit in shops (and they REALLY are!), then a niche genre like ours can't possibly hope to do any better.

I seriously doubt that there isn't a sweet spot somewhere in between.
Lately AAA games have seriously been lacking in gameplay department while the price of all the art assets, management leeches, marketing machines and massive budgets, just seems to be collapsing in on itself. Of course they can't be profitable when the price of making an AAA is now above $100 million, that's a lot of units that need to be sold.

It has been proven time and time again that super best awesome graphics and marketing are not the key to success or a needed for a game to be sold a lot or to make money. Not just talking about some games which are a product of a loving creator who works in his/her free time over years, but things can be made in studio and industrial ways and still be profitable enough for studios to be working. Of course there needs to be some games which do have the budget to pull of some things, but right now the greediness of bigger publishers seems to overfill the market more often these days, while the people that are running these publisher show every time that they don't the first thing about games or the market or how to treat customers.

In any case AAA market is not the reflection of the gaming market in general, people who don't know this market have taken over and is leading them the wrong path, with only a few exceptions where games are successful enough to be profitable even when the company is broken from the management side of things.

[theSynapse]

YOu're making it more complicated that it need be, and you're completely missing the point.

If you make a boxed game, you make so little money per copy that you have to sell a lot of copies before you can make profit.

If you deliver it digitally however, most of your costs of getting it to market are slashed. Then you don't need to sell so many copies.

It's got nothing to do with gameplay or the merits of a game. It's got everything to do with economics and common sense.

[ThreeOhFour]

As a result from the fallout of this, the developers of J.U.L.I.A.  - who have basically made no money from a game they spent years developing - have a small Indiegogo fund set up to try and help them recover from this.

I pledged as soon as I saw it - the whole situation made me feel terrible and I was happy to have some way to help out. It'd be awesome to get a few more pledges up there and help these guys keep making games, otherwise we face losing another adventure developer - surely if any cause is worthy of support this is it.