The video game publishing industry is a sham founded on abusive, borderline usurious contracts, preying relentlessly on the desperation of independent developers to have their vision seen. Let's have a thread about it.
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With such an uncertain future in front of them, is it any surprise that independent developers fold like a deck of cards, and accept whatever abusive contract gets set in front of them by an independent publisher, in the hopes that now, maybe, their dream will be realized?
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Microsoft had it right with Xbox Live Indie Games. It was derided far and wide for its propensity for one-off trash games, but precious few articles really struck to the core of what it was: The outright democratization of game publishing.
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In 2011, after being laid off from Activision in the great Guitar Hero layoff, and before starting at Scaleform, my fellow laid-off coworkers and I decided to realize our dream, forming Bat Country Entertainment. Our first tile, AardBloxx, was a clone of BlockOut - 3D Tetris.
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Would we have ever found a proper publisher for it? Heavens, no - The Tetris Company jealously guards its IP, and nobody would want to touch such a thing these days with a ten-meter cattle prod. It made a grand total of 50 bucks. But we made it, and it was seen.
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What I'm driving at here is that publishers like Nicalis are the symptom, not the disease itself. The disease infesting the industry is this ouroboros-like culture of requiring success, a priori, before you're even given a chance of being successful.
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The disease is first-party publishers requiring a financial outlay on the order of thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, when anyone who works in the industry can tell you that their development hardware is little more than a re-flashed retail box.
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The disease is Valve hypocritically claiming to have some kind of quality bar for what gets published on Steam, when Bad Rats, or hundreds or even thousands of one-Euro "games" which are little more than asset flips, sail by their approval process by virtue of having a publisher.
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Is there a solution to this? I haven't the slightest idea. All I want is for people to be aware that these things happen. That small teams of creators, lacking any other venue, can and do sign on to contracts not out of ignorance, but desperation.
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