I see they’d share these contracts openly because I just assumed “funding” meant “Here’s a check for 1m dollars. We expect the game by this date.” I mean probably not that simple but they still aren’t a first party studio so I wouldn’t have expected it to be this catastrophic when Microsoft pulls funding. But the same thing happened when Contraband was canceled. So the independent studio owns the work and the IP, but the funding from third parties isn’t like a long time money investment but more ongoing? Either way it sucks if Microsoft can pull out of a deal whenever and then it’s just up to the independent studio to deal with the consequences. Even with stuff like IO themselves not saying who was financing the game. These deals seem so designed to let partners like Microsoft pull out whenever with no consequences.
Glad they’re still developing it and all. Hopefully the end result does still come out and doesn’t suffer too much from this.
I imagine the agreement is they’ll pay X per month to cover the costs of production - and yes publishers have nearly always stacked the deck in their favour in cancellation terms and many other bits, hence the regular conflict we’ve seen between devs and publishers and devs creating their own publishing labels
I hate silly stories like this. You can’t blame XBOX for this studio closer its down to IO & expanding beyond their means, very much like Crytek