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Epic Games Publishing lets developers retain their intellectual property

Epic Games has had a massive impact on the videogame scene thanks to having ownership of Fortnite and the Epic Games Store. Now it looks like the company will further push its lead with the announcement of Epic Games Publishing.

Three key aspects of this publishing effort, according to a recent announcement, are:

  • Full creative freedom and ownership. Developers retain 100 percent of all intellectual property and full creative control of their work.
  • Fully-funded projects. Epic Games Publishing will cover up to 100 percent of development costs, from developer salaries to go-to-market expenses such as QA, localisation, marketing, and all publishing costs.
  • 50/50 profit sharing. Developers earn a fair share for their work — once costs are recouped, developers earn at least 50% of all profits.

The 100 percent intellectual property and full creative control point is most interesting to us. So many times in the past we’ve seen beloved games and entire franchises stuck in limbo as developers would like to work on the IP further but the publisher shows no interest.

On the opposite side of the same coin the original developers may have their IPs shifted to new studios as publishers hope to pump out new games when the devs have decided to stop work and start on something else.

Hopefully this format of publishing will result in similar situations not happening in the future.

In terms of finances in the two other key points we will have to see how that pans out in the future as the first games from this publishing deal come to light.

In that regard three big developers have been announced as part of Epic Games Publishing: Remedy Entertainment, Playdead and GenDESIGN. These three are probably best known for Control, Inside and The Last Guardian respectively.

Unfortunately, at this time, no concrete information about what new games from these developers is available.

This announcement has also stirred up a bit of controversy, as always. Epic Games has earned itself a bad reputation for making games exclusive to their platform, on top of the fact that the company is partially owned by Chinese consortium Tencent.

Finally, it should be noted that Epic Games specifically mentions that this publishing effort is “multiplatform”, which hopefully means that any new games to come from it will be available on as many consoles as possible, as well as PC.

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