[dawnbreez]

I mean, you can call it IP theft, I can call it wage theft. The article quotes one of the devs as saying they had "unpaid milestones", which reads an awful lot like the "major publisher" he didn't want to name for legal reasons had violated the one term that mattered: the part where they pay for the game.

The lesson to take away here, for management, is that you can't get away with everything forever. Whether you view the actions of 2015 as IP theft or just desserts, the fact remains that it wouldn't have happened if the team had A) gotten paid and B) gotten the terms they asked for. I'd be demanding a better deal, too, if my publisher mysteriously forgot to pay for a milestone.

[jollybean]

The lesson for 'management' is get better contracts and don't invest and develop people who will walk out with your stuff.

Item 'A' is a bit more reasonable, people not getting paid is bad.

But item 'B' is not. Sorry, you don't just get to ask for a better deal after the fact, because it finally worked out and now in 20/20 hindsight you want a cut.

[dawnbreez]

But why not? Why shouldn't there be a process for renegotiating a contract? Especially in cases like this, where the employees are still producing things for the management--I would understand if you were renegotiating JUST on an existing product, because renegotiating on a deal that's already over makes the deal drag on unnecessarily, but these people were probably working on a new game while talking about renegotiating their contract. They weren't just talking about their compensation for the game they'd already finished; they were talking about compensation for every game they'd make in the future with that publisher.