Going gold?

[ptisinge]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

No not really, the developer chooses there publisher. Ultimately in this case its the developers responsibility to find a good publisher and negotiate a contract with them...

Hum, that's wishful thinking, but that's not the reality of the situation... Finding a publisher and securing a contract is a major struggle for developers. Many projects died and ran out of money before they could reach that point. It's the developer responsibility to live another day and for another contract. Any developer feel very lucky when it can line up 2, just 2 publishers for a little while, and often one will bail out without a concrete offer anyway. And I'm not talking about small studios only. Many developers handling multi million dollars projects and selling millions of their games still feel like that and are unable to ever feel secure for more than a few years. Your vision of the balance of power and bargain in the industry is quite distorted to say the very least.