The typical strategy that has caused more than one independent developer to die in the last two years is pretty cynical. It basically boils down to – publisher/distributor owes a developer money. They don’t pay. The legal hassle starts, the developer finds itself in trouble because it was counting on that money. If the developer doesn’t have sufficient financial stamina to last for quite some time and pay the required legal fees (which are very high), the developer dies, the publisher doesn’t have to pay its royalties and problem solved (from the publisher point of view).
I find this obscene, and I can easily pinpoint the developers that died because of these practices, and it’s only made possible because the revenues from the sales of the game don’t arrive directly at the developer. I get sick when I see some publishers who I know engaged in these practices boast how they steered their company through difficulty times, because they did it by using illegal methods bordering on the criminal.
