Hooded Horse CEO says most publishing contracts put too much risk on developers

Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse (the publisher behind Manor Lords), says a lot of game publishing contracts are written in ways that are inefficient and unfair to developers, mainly because they load too much risk onto studios.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Bender argued that contracts should put risk on “the party best able to bear that risk,” and he doesn’t think that’s how many publishing deals work right now.

Bender also shared what he described as Hooded Horse’s standard terms with partner studios: 65% of revenue goes to the developer. He said the publisher takes a larger cut in cases where it has partially funded the game.

One of the bigger points he called out was recoup, the common setup where a publisher takes its costs back first before revenue is split. Bender said Hooded Horse’s deals have “no recoup,” and he criticized the practice as harmful for games that need time to recover after launch or build an audience. In his view, heavy recoup terms can choke off the money a developer would need to keep supporting and improving a game.

This follows earlier comments from Bender about generative AI. Last year, he said Hooded Horse would not work with studios using generative AI.