When talking about a developer that terminated their contract with 10k, the author says: "There was a moment to reconsider the contract and I've failed to explain our value." After reading the first chapter and skimming the remaining chapters, I have no idea what value they were providing either.<p>I am cynical, perhaps even bitter and jaded, but it sounds like this kind of publisher business is parasitic. They seek out devs that are naive, promise them "publisher stuff" and some devs don't really know any better and just assume the publisher is doing something for them. In some small percentage of cases a lucky publisher finds just the right naive dev, signs a contract and finds themselves with a cash cow. It literally sounds like they would just seek out any dev with a heartbeat, offer them "publisher stuff" (like testing? level design? documentation?), sign them to a contract and hope they would eventually get a hit.<p>So my unflattering take of what little I understood of this jumbled story was that this parasitic organization (that sounds completely dysfunctional) was unable to find a suitable victim.<p>He talks about his pitch to developers: "You will get months of unpaid work under our supervision…" He talks about building his team: "part-time entry-lvl intern-like specialists firstly designed to fulfill simple scripted tasks"<p>Everything here just seems terrible to me.