Ask any game developer and they’ll tell you that publishers are the scum of the earth. It’s never a question of “if” the publisher screws you, it’s “when”. During my 15 years as a developer I have seen publishers pull every dirty trick imaginable, from telling the dev team of a certain AAA title to remove all the black kids from the game (“it hurts sales in Germany”) to informing a small studio that they were only going to pay half what they owed for work already completed, and then only if the studio signs a legal waiver first (knowing full well that because of late payments the studio would be out of business long before it reached court). This story is not about publishers, but it is about the kinds of situations that publishers create and the lengths that we developers are often forced to go to in order to clean up the messes they leave us with.
Game Dev Story is a business simulation about choices.