Terms of our Label
Part of Pantaloon’s mission as an indie label is to restore - what we believe to be - the broken power balance in the indie publishing world. This page, then, aims to provide transparency around how we work with studios and offer as grounded an insight as possible into the terms that define our contracts.
The Headlines.
Budget Thresholds
Pantaloon operates in the micro-indie space, looking to build a label of small games with big hooks. For now, our dev-budgets are in the $30k-$100k sort of range, but we strive to be as flexible as possible on this front.
Portfolio Fit
Pantaloon isn’t handcuffed to a genre. We do look for a theme, however. An aesthetic. An intangible offbeat quality that simply makes your game bizarre. We want to explore uncharted genre-waters and find new combinations of systems that haven’t been brought together before.
Publishing Type
Pantaloon can fund the development - or more likely, remainder of the development - of your game in exchange for a slice of the pie (see below). We also offer white-labelled ‘shadow’ publishing opportunities for studios that wish to self-publish, however (and if you can, you should!)
The Service Offering.
Full brand-lead marketing campaigns
Pantaloon is set up to bring your game to market with as much noise and fanfare as possible. We offer a full marketing solution, covering brand and positioning strategy, roadmaps and asset-plans, events, PR, influencer, community and social - amongst other things. We also look to leverage deep, player-tailored email and CRM strategies as an in-house speciality and area of focus.
Release Management & Store Optimisation
Pantaloon specialises in the PC space, and can bring your game to Steam (and Itch/Epic) with a platform-optimised strategy that pulls the various levers required to make the all-powerful algorithm take as much notice as possible.
On Production & QA services
At present, Pantaloon will not be offering in-house production or QA services, although the latter is something we can look to provide via trusted partners as required.
We will, however, look at metric-led localisation strategies and expanding the markets your game is available in.
The Nitty Gritty.
Fair & Flexible Rev Splits
We believe the standard publisher cut is too high, and therefore have a max cap on our split of 35%. This figure is, of course, tied to other aspects of the deal, but typically we would aim for a 70/30 ratio in favour of the developer, and we go south from there.
We won’t take your IP
Shouldn’t need saying really, but we’ll say it anyway. Your game is your IP, and we won’t look to take any ownership as part of our terms.
Not much more to say, really.
No Recoup
Developer’s needing to hit a recoup figure before they make anything from their game bothers us. We look to absorb this cost in our offer. Pantaloon will never force a recoup upon our developers, and royalties will in step with platform pay-outs.
On minimum marketing spends
We always imagined our contracts would have a minimum marketing spend, but - having interrogated this thoroughly - this can be highly ambiguous, restrictive & incentivise inefficient spending simply to hit a contractual threshold. We simply strive to run the most effective campaigns possible with the resource we have, across a blend of organic & paid initiatives.
Open Termination Clauses
Being locked into a contract (especially if you have a recoup figure that’s never going to be hit) sucks. And so we have fair termination clauses in the event of both continuous low sales and high sales, so developers have full autonomy to take the project back on their own terms. We don’t want to hold your game hostage.