>Like ea for example generally has a hands off approach..they give the dev team a bag of money and then say make your game but I expect 2 bags of money back idc how your get it.

Sounds awfully a lot like a fetch quest, no wonder these guys produce videogames lol

Thanks! A couple more questions for you and anyone else who'd like to chip in:

1.) What sort of deals do publishers get for the games they publish? e.g. a literary publisher will get the right to sell and distribute an individual book, but the author largely retains control of the "franchise", in the sense that the publisher couldn't just override them one morning and commission a sequel to someone else or change the ending to the novel. How does it work for game developers? Do they also retain some form of artistic control, or do they surrender everything related to the game?

2.) In the literary world, it's always the authors who go courting the publishing houses. Is it the same in the gaming world, or do publishers actively seek out smaller game studios? And how do the parties communicate? Is there the equivalent of literary agents doing the intermediation?

3.) I'm having a hard time imagining a large publishing house giving a small developer access to resources like game engines and even employees for a game that evidently doesn't have anything to show for itself yet. How does that process work? Does the developer team need to prove itself first by creating one or two successful games before they can hope for the endorsement of a publisher, or can a pitch be so strong that they get these resources even with little more than a game concept to go on?

Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far for helping lift the veil of my ignorance!

>Also, like book or music publishers, video game publishers may also advance some money to the developers to fund the development of the game, working essentially as venture capital.

Ok. Venture capital usually works by taking a percentage of a funded company's ownership (in the form of stock) in exchange for the cash. In the case of the videogame publisher, what do they get exactly - full ownership of the game's franchise including any control over future sequels, DLC, etc? Or do the developers retain some property rights (like an author would do when selling a book to a publisher)?

Also, I'm not at all downplaying the importance of marketing and funding, but basically this is all that a publisher does? Do they get involved with the actual creation of the game in any way, or with the way that the developer team does stuff?

Could you go into a bit more detail? I mean, a book publisher actually prints books and has them shipped to bookstores. But a game on Steam doesn't need to be printed or distributed, and Steam barely has any ads in the first place. So a videogame publisher does, what? Just the ads? Are they basically just an advertising agency specialized in videogames?

>TL;DR Committing to NoFap has made me homosexual

The logical interpretation.