amazing quote from noted oaf "asmongold" in a gamedeveloper piece on streamer-owned publishers. sorry to gatekeep but if you don't understand how nets work i don't think you're ready to weigh in on computer games. get your ass back to the bronze age and STUDY !!!
tbh even leaving aside the absolute clown shoes streamer shit I'm going to say that it's an exceptionally bad idea to offer 30% of your total revenue on your finished game to a "publisher" in exchange for ONLY QA testing and "platform relations". No guaranteed marketing spend? No funding? Fuck off imo. This is literally free money for them, they are putting zero skin in the game
There's a lot of mid-size record labels like this that email me. They always say they're really impressed by where I am as an artist and put forth an offer to go into business together or buy my catalog for a few years. It is all about skimming something off what I worked hard to make and offering nebulous "artist services" in return. And the paid offers for buying my catalog are always a fraction of what I make from owning it myself, like y'all don't think I look at what I'm getting paid?
They want to put their stamp on something that basically already exists and extract value from it. It feels like so much boils down to that right now, for the people with the money
the only reason people go to publishers in the first place is because they have this big apparatus behind them to test and market your shit. that's what you get that cut of the profits for. without that there's literally no reason not to just self publish and patch any holes as they're exposed. sure, with games the barrier of entry is lower than say movies, but we've already seen this come to its logical conclusion in say, music. you can sweeten up the deal for your own side all you want but for as much as rich people like to hammer on ~basic economics~ you'd think these chucklefucks would at least understand that eventually just figuring their shit out for themselves becomes a more attractive prospect to their would-be consumers than continuing to have profit squeezed out of them for increasingly little in return
