Indie dev Jakefriend's refusal of a $500,000 contract highlights an issue that needs to be addressed

Ever come across a Kickstarter game called Scrabdackle?

If so, you'd probably be familiar with its developer too – a one-man studio operation called Jakefriend.

With gaming becoming as big a market as it is, it's becoming common to see more developers, many of whom are mere hobbyists like Jakefriend, springing up to share their creations with the community.

And some of these titles are actually pretty damn good, like the award-winning Untitled Goose Game by House House.

However, we're not here to talk about the growing crop of indie developers - we're here to talk about how the industry is responding to them.

Case in point, according to a report originally done by Kotaku (thanks!), the aforementioned Jakefriend recently shared on Twitter that he's turned down a rather lucrative publishing contract – one that's worth half a million Canadian dollars (S$538,000), no less.

Although the instantaneous response might be to laugh at the apparent foolishness of refusing such a large sum of money, Jakefriend's refusal to sign the contract actually highlights an issue that many indie developers face today: "predatory behaviour" with regard to publishing contracts.

Normally, many indie developers would consider getting a nice contract from an established publisher the equivalent of hitting the jackpot, but in recent years, many of these contracts have devolved to present significantly more risk than reward to these developers. 

Specifically, many of the clauses found within such agreements are worded to allow the publisher full control and rights over the indie dev's IP if a breach of contract (which is often ambiguous) is found.

So, not only would the poor developer end up in an otherwise permanent mountain of debt, but the contract might also allow the publisher to continue generating content for their IP using their money.

Accordingly, after taking these risks into account, Jakefriend's choice would appear to be the logical one.

Of course, we're not saying that every single game publisher purposely sets out to milk these indie developers dry - Jakefriend has actually clarified that he didn't sense any malicious intent from the publisher who reached out to him, though how genuine they really were is anybody's guess.

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However, that doesn't excuse that he found some of the clauses in his contract "exploitative", which brings us to the underlying issue - such clauses and behaviour have apparently become so commonplace that they're already considered to be the norm.

Many other developers, like Remedy's Paul Ehreth (who worked on Control) and Heartstrings Studios' Ben Cross, have since weighed in with their own experiences.

Ehreth in particular noted how one such predatory clause would have given the publisher the rights to search the studio's premises whenever they wanted in order to "ensure compliance", and we don't see how that's any different from holding up a bank at gunpoint.

Needless to say, Ehreth didn't sign that piece of paper.

But the feedback of another indie developer, Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) raises yet another valid point.

According to him, many of these companies are simply playing the fool by pretending they don't know the clauses are heavily biased, which he says causes "most indies presented with the response" to seal the deal.

In short, this point calls the publishers' supposed lack of malicious intent into question, adding yet another factor into this already-convoluted equation.

But much like any other equation, convoluted or not, this one needs solving.

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This article was first published in Hardware Zone.