A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

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.

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.

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.

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.