grudgebearer wrote on Jun 27, 2019, 00:30:

CJ_Parker wrote on Jun 26, 2019, 23:47:

If you are very short-sighted then you might arrive at such a simple conclusion, yes.

First, the self-publishing devs obviously get the full 88% or even 93% if their game uses the Unreal engine. More income for a self-publishing dev could definitely result in growth, thus in higher quality games and/or allow a dev to maintain their independent status instead of being forced to seek external funding.

The dev could also be a selfish asshole and buy a yacht but that's hardly in Epic's hands to decide. All that Epic can do and *are* doing is create the opportunity for devs to earn more which equals the opportunity for a developer to invest in their future because that is what profits are for in classic 101 economics: Profits -> investment -> growth -> more profit -> more investments -> more growth and so on.

Secondly, in a classic dev/publisher relationship the publisher could increase the budget for games due to a higher income. The publisher could also fund the development of more games in parallel which would help them diversify their risks which is always good, both for the publisher as well as all developers depending on a certain publisher's funding.

Similarly, the developer could negotiate a better deal if they know that the publisher is getting to keep a higher cut. It gives the devs more leverage in negotiations. They could even demand that the publisher at least co-publishes the game on EGS in addition to other storefronts in order to maximize profits which would result in receiving royalties sooner.
Re royalties: Due to the common royalties against advance model, the dev would definitely always benefit from maximized publisher profits because the sooner the publisher breaks even, the sooner the royalties begin to flow.

You don't seem to have a very good understanding of the imbalance of the publisher/developer relationship in the gaming industry.

Most devs are paid up font on royalties in a prepay structure from the publisher, and quite often royalty payments from the actual game sales are nonexistent until the publisher recoups all of their advance on royalties to the developer.

The EGS 88/12 split, unless a dev is acting as their own publisher is not guaranteed to aid the developers in any way. Not even Sweeney has been so stupid as to claim that publishers through their benevolent altruism have restructured their agreements with developers to give them more money because the publisher has a better revenue split on the Epic store. The publisher has literally zero incentive to renegotiate an already in place contract with the developer, it's actual terrible business to do so.