Re:The death of the mid-sized developer. (Score 1)

EA isn't the only one at fault here, though. Infogrames (now Atari--also affiliated with Hasbro) has killed its share of great developers in its time. Microprose anyone?

The problem with the gaming industry isn't EA in particular, it's big publishers in general. In all the comments on this entire article, everyone keeps lamenting the death of [insert developers] at the hands of [insert publisher], yet no one seems to entirely grok the fact the real problem is the publishers.

Think about it. What do publishers do? Fund, advertise, and distribute. The internet makes their hand in distribution mostly a moot point nowadays, since if a developer had a truly great game, they could sell it online. The publisher only advertises in an effort to make money themselves, not to help out the developers, and contracts don't even usually include a promise for any amount of advertising. So the key point comes to funding. Basically, publishers are--in a nutshell--venture capitalists. They give the developer money up-front to fund the development (pay the creators and whatnot) and in return garner the vast majority of the profits.

The problem lies in how much control these speculative investors demand in their contracts. The publisher ends up with the right to control nearly everything in return for the starting capital and an expectation (sometimes not even followed through) to advertise and garner sales. The publisher can back out at any time and leave the developer in a lurch just because some MBA in a suit didn't think the game being developed had enough "mass appeal," and sometimes even come away with the rights to the name of the game being developed despite never following through. Since they provide all the money, most of the time a game is released too soon with lots of bugs, it's because of the publisher, not the developer. No developer dares piss the publisher off by taking too long and finding their baby scrapped when almost complete.

A developer with the ability to fund themselves from the start could make far more long-term profit even with a moderate number of online sales at a budget price than developers of hit top-retailing games ever see. Most of the time, royalties barely amount to double digit percentages (even for a proven developer), and the funding provided during development is an advance on those royalties, so the developer doesn't see a penny after the game launches until the half million units move...if that ever happens. Meanwhile, the publisher breaks even at 50k units and rakes in the dough past that. A publisher with the smallest amount of advertising moxie can guarantee that amount of sales of even a buggy bomb of a title, as anyone who's ever microwaved a game CD can attest.

Granted, nothing is likely to change anytime soon, since developers don't have a couple mill sitting around to develop a game on their own. But if you ever see a game selling online for a nice price directly from a developer, keep in mind almost your entire dollar is going straight to them, instead of $15 to the retailer, $10 to a box and manual you might flip through once, $15 to a publisher like EA...and $5 also to the publisher to pay off the developer's advance.