Who’s Paying?
When the game industry started out, developers programmed games in their garages.2 These young game creators soon formed companies like Atari, Activision, and Sierra, and eventually sold their games around the world.3 As gaming took off, many of these developers evolved into publishers, manufacturing their own games, gaming consoles and eventually hiring other development teams to create games for them.
Since the mid-80s, as consoles became the dominant system for playing video games, the publishers gained more control over what games were made. During this time, you could still create and distribute your game without a publisher … but only if it was on a computer, not a console. While there were some digital distributors like Stardock, it was mainly publishers who controlled major releases, as they were the ones who could afford to invest the capital necessary to develop console games. When Internet-enabled consoles became the norm, publishers started to offer...