Outersloth released its contract terms publicly
I was at the GDC talk session where Outersloth, the game funding arm of Among Us developer Innersloth, released a public copy of their game funding contract.
Indie game developers are often at a huge disadvantage in publisher negotiations. Small teams running on low funding tend to lack business experts of any kind. Many of the small teams I've met in my life did not contain a member who had ever signed a funding contract before. These teams cannot tell whether the publishing terms they're offered are good or bad. This kind of information is so precious that the many indie dev communities' core purpose is often to share this kind of information and to puzzle through learning about this stuff together.
Occasionally, indie game publishers will release contract terms publicly, often while claiming that their terms are very advantageous to developers. It's common for these contracts to be much less friendly than claimed.
Outersloth's contract is now publicly visible in their presskit dropbox here. Based on what I know about the current state of indie contracts... these are pretty good numbers! They take only 50% before recouping the full value of their investment, and only 15% after, which is maybe the lowest I've ever seen personally. The contract has a term of only seven years, which is pretty short. A lot of publishers these days want a perpetual contract, and may even want to buy your IP, which is very rarely IMO worth it for the amount of money you're likely to get for an indie game dev project.
The tradeoff with working with a fund like Outersloth however is that they do not provide any publishing services. Publishing services often include labor like vetting and managing your vendors (QA, localization, etc) or handling the release management for your game - setting it up on all the stores for the regions you will sell it, managing pricing, etc. And of course, the most crucial service people are looking for with a publisher is marketing support, which Outersloth also does not provide.
The labor associated with traditional publishing services is absolutely massive and there's a good reason a lot of developers do not want to have to staff up to do it themselves. Staffing up to do this work can be a huge risk - even hiring and managing vendors can be a huge pain in the ass if you don't actually have the bandwidth to do it. So there are plenty of reasons why someone would not want to work with a group like Outersloth, despite the relatively good numbers.
I haven't had time to read the entire Outersloth contract yet - I'm still at GDC and very busy all day every day - but I am interested in digging in when I get home. A lot of my friends are currently moving into the phase of their careers where they are pitching publishers and trying to make something happen for themselves. This is happening not only because we're all increasingly senior and experience, but also because we're all being laid off. When working for a AAA company is exactly as big a risk as working for a small team, or even for yourself... why bother working for the man at all?
I think for narrative in particular, surviving the absolutely hysterical LLM hype wave will require a lot of us to move writing into part-time work, or to pitch games to publishers and employ ourselves. If nobody at a big company will employ you, it seems safer to just employ yourself!