When talking about a developer that terminated their contract with 10k, the author says: "There was a moment to reconsider the contract and I've failed to explain our value." After reading the first chapter and skimming the remaining chapters, I have no idea what value they were providing either.
I am cynical, perhaps even bitter and jaded, but it sounds like this kind of publisher business is parasitic. They seek out devs that are naive, promise them "publisher stuff" and some devs don't really know any better and just assume the publisher is doing something for them. In some small percentage of cases a lucky publisher finds just the right naive dev, signs a contract and finds themselves with a cash cow. It literally sounds like they would just seek out any dev with a heartbeat, offer them "publisher stuff" (like testing? level design? documentation?), sign them to a contract and hope they would eventually get a hit.
So my unflattering take of what little I understood of this jumbled story was that this parasitic organization (that sounds completely dysfunctional) was unable to find a suitable victim.
He talks about his pitch to developers: "You will get months of unpaid work under our supervision…" He talks about building his team: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks"
I don’t know anything about the game dev or publishing business. What I do know though it that many tech teams are good at tech but often not so good at other tasks that are all part of a successful business.
That starts with project management, goes over organisation or knowledge how to run a company and ends in knowing how to make profit.
There is also nothing wrong with this. I have described 3-4 different departments in a company. Chances are you are not good (enough) in all of them, and even if you are you won’t have time to do all of it good.
There is also value to just know how a industry works. As a new starter you can make your own experiences or you pay for existing experience, one way or another. This is an important business decision that you have to make. Make or buy. You simply can’t do everything yourself. So what to make and what to buy.
I don’t know if this is what publisher do (the name suggests otherwise) but I guess every dev team that thinks they have a hit still have a lot of non game dev related evaluations and decisions to make and sometimes you have to pay people with the right expertise to help you.
I would not argue against the value of professional services. Two that come to mind immediately are lawyers and accountants. It is probably a good idea to seek out professional advice for those. I think a similar case could be made for marketing and sales. One thing to note about lawyers and accountants is that you need accreditation to offer those services. That helps to keep the worst kind of parasitic behavior under control, although it isn't perfect.
But the real defense of my argument is in my own weasel words. "this kind of publisher business is parasitic."
Again, lets just consider the words in the article, starting with the quote I already cited: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks". The CEO of this publishing house hired totally inexperienced people, gave them a couple of months of scripted tasks and then sold them to developers as experts.
Second, another couple of quotes: "That's how within two years we have cooperated with almost 150 studios and produced 40+ games simultaneously at the peak." and "all in all there were 6 ROAS-positive soft launches, none of which didn’t happen as a hit."
I find these a bit hard to parse, but what I gather is that they worked on at least 40+ games of which only 6 had positive metrics and none of which was a success. Imagine that in a world of professionals like lawyers and accountants: having worked with that many businesses and never won a case or successfully balanced the books.
The real tragedy, IMO, is that there are likely numerous examples of publishers with equal levels of inexperience (or incompetence) that probably just happened to luck across the right dev at the right moment. Once you sign a contract with one of these leeches you are on the hook to pay them even if the "expert advice" provided by their 6 month veterans is as worthless as you would expect.
I am cynical, perhaps even bitter and jaded, but it sounds like this kind of publisher business is parasitic. They seek out devs that are naive, promise them "publisher stuff" and some devs don't really know any better and just assume the publisher is doing something for them. In some small percentage of cases a lucky publisher finds just the right naive dev, signs a contract and finds themselves with a cash cow. It literally sounds like they would just seek out any dev with a heartbeat, offer them "publisher stuff" (like testing? level design? documentation?), sign them to a contract and hope they would eventually get a hit.
So my unflattering take of what little I understood of this jumbled story was that this parasitic organization (that sounds completely dysfunctional) was unable to find a suitable victim.
He talks about his pitch to developers: "You will get months of unpaid work under our supervision…" He talks about building his team: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks"
Everything here just seems terrible to me.