Quote Originally Posted by desslock View Post
In other words, to me they are like glorified beer distributors - companies who because of some structural requirement, people have to go to them to get their products to the public.
Steve
I think that depends a lot on the distributor. In truth, every distributor probably has more product lines than they can effectively handle, so some clients will get great service and quite a few might get little to no service at all. That's one of the things I have to say about White Tiger, they have expressed a desire in limiting the number of studios they carry, and if their financial model supports that idea, they should be able to provide good service to their studios AND to the retailers they service.

If the relationship with the distributor is a healthy one, the distributor and the studio are working closely together. The distributor has his ear on the pulse of what retailers and customers are asking for and can communicate that to the studio, who, in turn can shoot or edit or mold the product he produces to better fit what the market wants. Likewise, the studio that is really aggressive and works hard to provide product on time and when needed will win more support from the distributor.

I think a lot of studios make the mistake of saying "I have a distributor" and sit back and let the distributor do all the work... and then said studio gets mad when their titles don't sell as well as they'd like. If there's good dialog and a strong effort both on the part of the studio and the distributor, then a lot is possible... but there are distributors who are just "order takers" and there are studios who take the "I don't want to fuck with marketing" approach, and those two types are, unfortunately, all too typical in this business.