Independent developers refuse to invest large sums of money, exposing chaos in the industry

Recently, an independent game developer named "Jakefriend" on Twitter published a post to expose the ugly face of the publisher. He pointed out that an independent game publisher invested 500,000 Canadian dollars to invest in its hand-drawn action adventure game "Scrabdackle". But when he was about to sign the contract, he found the clues and finally refused to sign the contract.

While browsing the contract, he found that there was something unreasonable.

First of all, the game publisher puts forward the requirement of half revenue sharing, but he can participate in revenue sharing only after 50% of marketing costs and subsequent development costs are fully recovered. This means that after 24,000 copies of the game are sold, Jakefriend will receive revenue.

Secondly, if Jakefriend has any doubts about the income, it must conduct a financial audit at its own expense. Even if the game publisher is found to have problems after the audit, it only needs to make up the payables and does not assume other responsibilities.

In addition, if later publishers and Jakefriend disagree on the game direction, the publisher has the right to veto Jakefriend's decision and introduce third-party developers to continue to develop the direction that Jakefriend does not want to develop, but all costs need to be borne by Jakefriend.

In addition, Jakefriend found that the definition of developer breach in the contract is very vague and the penalty for breach of contract is very severe. If the developer defaults, in addition to losing the game copyright, all revenue, and investment of 500,000 Canadian dollars, he must also pay all the expenses incurred in subsequent game development. The cost to bear is almost unlimited, which is likely to make the developer indebted for life .

After Jakefriend released his own experience, many developers said they were very familiar with and guessed who this publisher is. Jonathan Blow, the developer of the game "The Witness", posted: "I have guessed who the publisher is because I have seen similar contracts." Then he explained: "This problem is very common, when you describe these things. Everyone thinks they know who the publisher is, but everyone’s guess is different."