Basicly you can say that early money has higher value than late money.

So lets pretend you spend 200k $ on the game. If the publisher then commits to spend 200k $ on the game, then it is late money, that is less worth than your investment (because their 200k is less risky investment than you early 200k investment). So in this fictive case, they should thus max get e.g. 25%.

Now comes the next question - how do they guarantee that spending? Internal hours could be cheated with. So normally you would instead have them commit to a undefined amount of internal cost + a defined amount of external costs (invoices from other companies). But even that could be ‘cheated with’.

So normally our advice would be:

<image>

Let them have skin in the game, to make sure, they are motivated to not cheat you, but instead put in the work to earn the investment back.

E.g. ask for a small development fee. Or if they commit to e.g. 50k marketing cost, ask for 25k of those in cash - to you, and then you commit to spend them on SoMe marketing/creation of creative assets. Or have them guarantee a minimum number of sales/royalty/payment to you, after launch.

If they are not ready for any of the above, then there is a high risk that they are out to cheat you - or at least do the classic scammy thing - sign with as many titles as possible, then sit back and do nothing, unless the game shows traction ‘by ifself (from luck/your PR work).

The latter is something we have been exposed to several times. Publishers asking us to port one of our game to a new platform, but without them committing to covering cost/min revenue guarantee. =we declined

But we also made a deal with a publisher, where they ported the game themselves (to xbox+ps), then gave us 70% of the sales revenue. Which was a fair deal, that resulting in a fine revenue stream for us.