The big bucks dudes(to be clear here we're talking about publishers, not developers) are incentivized to keep the status quo. They get a constant stream of new talent that works at sub-par rates.
Very few studios are independent at this point so it's rare for any of them to have leverage. Since all the capital is organized around the big publishers unless you have a breakout success(which can be harder than the startup space) they can dictate terms and conditions.
There used to be a fun clause where upon studio bankruptcy the code/assets would revert to the publisher. Seems reasonable right?
Well what would happen is the publisher would start denying milestones for frivolous things, usually at peak headcount ~4mo from ship. This very quickly puts the studio in the red and they fold since they can't sustain a lawsuit and employ 100+ people while not getting paid. The publisher would then get source+assets, re-hire the team that was suddenly out of a job at 80% rate and ship the game with no royalty clause to the original studio + get IP. That's the kind of exploitation you see in that industry.
It's very similar to many of the abuses the Hollywood studio system has done over the decades. Hollywood seems to make it clear that the only working answer to making that somewhat sustainable for the talent, for the creative people, for all the people that aren't overpaid executive sharks and don't want to be entirely chewed up and spit out, is to unionize.
Yeah, there's a lot of parallels. In my mind it was always closer to the shenanigans that went on in the music/record industry because there's very little unionization in gamedev.
That's fucking sick game the publishers played. Thank goodness there are multiple ways better ways to fund a game studio right now instead of getting roped into one of these toxic relationships.
Very few studios are independent at this point so it's rare for any of them to have leverage. Since all the capital is organized around the big publishers unless you have a breakout success(which can be harder than the startup space) they can dictate terms and conditions.
There used to be a fun clause where upon studio bankruptcy the code/assets would revert to the publisher. Seems reasonable right?
Well what would happen is the publisher would start denying milestones for frivolous things, usually at peak headcount ~4mo from ship. This very quickly puts the studio in the red and they fold since they can't sustain a lawsuit and employ 100+ people while not getting paid. The publisher would then get source+assets, re-hire the team that was suddenly out of a job at 80% rate and ship the game with no royalty clause to the original studio + get IP. That's the kind of exploitation you see in that industry.