I’m about to work on porting my game to Switch, Xbox and PlayStation.
I’d like to release some physical copies. I know of Limited Run games but does anyone know of any other companies that could manufacturer them? I don’t think my game will be a big seller which might be an issue.
There’s iam8bit and Strictly Limited, but I’m going to likely burst your bubble ahead of time: this isn’t the sort of thing you can expect to do unless at least one of the following conditions have been met:
You have a publisher who has put enough faith into your product that even an extremely small physical run (see: 2000+ copies) is worth it to them and the physical publisher
You have already released your game and it is both successful and has a dedicated enough fanbase that it’s worth it to the physical publisher
You are willing to spend the generally $50,000+ (on the much lower end) production fee yourself
You’ll notice that very few truly unknown and small games get physical releases usually for all these reasons, and the ones you think may be unknown are usually cult hits. That’s why you’ll see a lot of shmups in Strictly Limited bulking out their releases alongside indie games that were minor breakout hits.
Last thing I know is that you have to have approval from the console makers to be legally allowed to produce and publish physical (or digital) games on their platform. And they only approve game publishers or big studios. At least that used to be the case around PS2 / PS3 generations.
This is still the case but the requirements are generally relaxed so that they just have to go through cert and have to be capable of the production themselves, which is how companies like Limited Run function.