‘Fortnite’ Creator Epic Games Wants To Make Game Publishing A Little Less Evil

'Control' developer Remedy Entertainment will publish games with Epic Games Publishing.

Credit: Remedy

Once upon a time, Google had a motto: Don’t be evil. After restructuring under the conglomerate Alphabet Inc in 2015, this was changed to Do the right thing.

Not as catchy, right? And also not as clear. Don’t be evil is a pretty clear and concise moral code. It places you in either the Good or Neutral camps on the Alignment Chart.

Do the right thing, on the other hand, is all a matter of perspective. If I was an evil overlord instructing my minions, I could tell them to “Do the right thing” and it could still be evil. Hitler probably once said to Himmler, das Richtige tun, but it sure didn’t mean “don’t be evil.”

In other words, don’t trust Google to not be evil. Along with the big social media giants, Amazon and every other giant tech company, power and influence are corrupting factors.

Then there are the video game publishers like EA, Activision, Tencent and all the rest. “Don’t be evil” has never been a motto of these companies. Even beloved developers like CD Projekt RED and Naughty Dog have subjected their workers to enormous amounts of crunch.

For that matter, so have Epic Games, delivering content for Fortnite at such a rapid pace last year that reports of crunch were all but inevitableâ€"though those reports may have resulted in at least a little change as the game’s rapid updates have slowed in 2020.

To its credit, Epic Games and CEO Tim Sweeney have been trying to enact positive changeâ€"albeit vis-a-bis controversial meansâ€"in the gaming industry ever since Fortnite became the world’s biggest hit and started making the company billions.

The Epic Game Store was the company’s first foray into enacting positive change in the video game industry. Epic was taking on Valve, the company behind the biggest PC gaming storefront in the world, Steam. They did this by gaining timed exclusivity to a bunch of popular upcoming games like Borderlands 3. And they gave all developers, whether exclusive or not, a far better cut than Steamâ€"88/12 vs 70/30.

Now, Epic Games is officially getting into the game publishing business with Epic Games Publishing and they’re trying to make the relationship between publisher and developer a little less evil as well.

Epic’s first partners in this new venture are gen DESIGN (The Last Guardian), Playdead (Inside, Limbo), and Remedy Entertainment (Control). Epic will publish multi-platform games from these studios but not with terms we’re used to seeing in the video game industry.

“We’re building the publishing model we always wanted for ourselves when we worked with publishers,” Sweeney said in a statement.

Here’s how Epic Games Publishing plans to make the relationship between developer and publisher healthier and more fair:

Full creative freedom and ownership. Developers retain 100% of all intellectual property and full creative control of their work.

Fully-funded projects. Epic Games Publishing will cover up to 100% of development costs, from developer salaries to go-to-market expenses such as QA, localization, marketing, and all publishing costs.

50/50 profit sharing. Developers earn a fair share for their work â€" once costs are recouped, developers earn at least 50% of all profits.

This is huge. Creative control and ownership of IP means that even if a studio parts ways with EGP in the future, they can keep making games in that franchise. We’ve seen high-profile instances of developers losing an IP when they broke off from a publisherâ€"think Bungie and Halo or Hideo Kojima and Metal Gear. With this deal, studios and creatives wouldn’t have to risk losing their creations.

The full funding of games plus 50% of profits after Epic recoups costs is also a huge step forward for developers. Most importantly, this sets a new precedentâ€"one which may not spur every other publisher in the business to make similar progressive changes, but which will tip the needle toward fairness.

All told, this is great news and I can’t wait to see what games gen DESIGN, Playdead and Remedy come up with. I expect we see many more studios follow suit, just like many game companies gladly hopped on-board the Epic Game Store with timed exclusives. Money matters in this business just as much as any other.