A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

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.

I've seen many tweets over the past weeks about the poor business practices of Nicalis, the crunch culture at Chucklefish, and I wonder: Why is anyone surprised? We game developers who have cushy, more-or-less guaranteed jobs in the industry, don't get it. And that's most of us.

Those of us lucky enough to work at some studio with 30+ people, we're insulated from the whims and whys of publishing - that's something that the studio directors take care of. For people with little more than a vision and a drive to realize it, they face it every day.

Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft love to tout how they're so friendly to independent developers: But are they, really? You still have to somehow stump up literally thousands of dollars for a development kit, and that's *if* you have an established publisher already backing you.

What about Steam? In that case, the ideal case, you have to stump up only a hundred bucks to get on there - though you're still subject to arbitrary review for your application, and have to jump through any number of hoops in the hopes that your game will even be listed.

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?

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.