Today Deep Silver announced that the company will be working with Square Enix to distribute Techland’s Dead Island out to retailers in North and South America. Deep Silver is still publishing, Square Enix is just getting the game out to store shelves.
I asked Aubrey Norris, PR Czar at Deep Silver, why Square Enix is handling the distribution and it’s due to Deep Silver not being large enough to work directly with retailers yet. “Retailers will only buy from companies that they do X amount of regular business with. Since [Deep Silver] is too small to have that, we need a distributor.”
“A retailer won’t buy from you unless you do X amount of business with them annually” Aubrey went on to tell me that “it’s kind of part of establishing yourself as a publisher. You have to get to a certain level of volume before retailers will work with you directly.”
I’m pretty sure Deep Silver will be able to reach the level they need with retailers considering how the entire Internet was talking about the chilling Dead Island trailer from a couple of months ago.
