There isn’t always a publisher. Sometimes the publisher owns them outright, and the devs will only see a salary in either case. There are only a handful of publishers that are worth more than a billion dollars and therefore run by billionaires, and they account for very few game releases in a given year on Steam these days. There’s a lot of nuance to this. And quite frankly, if a game I want to play comes from a billionaire’s company, I’m going to buy the game, they’re going to get some of my money, and I won’t feel bad about that.
Billionaires, multimillionaires, they’re all part of the problem. Right now you’re defending the people making you pay more for stuff than it’s worth.
If you sold something for $10 that hundreds of thousands of people wanted enough to buy it, you’d be a multimillionaire too. The only way you fund a development team with a handful of people working there is with multiple millions of dollars.
