Aleksandar Gavrilović
“As opposed to shareholding structures we’re all used to, the Summer Eternal governance model is slightly different, and based on the FairShares idea that the structure of the studio should reflect all the stakeholders of the studio. This includes the managing cooperative, our contributor cooperative with employees and freelancers, the investors, but also, most radically, players as well.”
Further down the page on the player co-op announcement:
“Usually, consumer cooperatives are organisations where consumers own the enterprise they buy from, but in our case, we opted for the consumers to be in a non-profit organisation instead, meaning the players do not extract profit for themselves, but they can choose where the organisation’s income is invested. Generally, it’s a step in the direction of mending the trust broken in this industry a thousand times over. We hope to initiate a shift in the mentality where the accountability of the developer to the player ends the moment the ‘buy’ button is pressed.”
Summer Eternal is an RPG studio co-founded by ex-ZA/UM designers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klindžić, as well as developer/organizer Aleksandar Gavrilović (quoted above). Given the former two developers’ experience working on a canceled Disco Elysium expansion, it makes sense they’d want to try something radically different for their new studio’s financing and governance.
Worker-owned cooperatives are rare but not unheard-of in games, but Summer Eternal is also looking to offer ownership stakes (and profit sharing) to its freelancers and customers. Crucially, it’s not in the form of “walkin’ around money” for the latter group. Instead, Summer Eternal wants to offer players a democratic say in the studio’s direction, backed up by control of 5% of the profits.
It reminds me of the EVE Online Council of Stellar Management or Old School RuneScape’s player voting on new features, but with this added element of the studio literally putting its money where its mouth is. At a time when traditionally governed, publicly-traded games companies are cannibalizing themselves before our eyes to fulfil a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, such an economically and politically radical proposition might have more broad appeal than it used to.
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You can read Gavrilović’s full posts on the governance of Summer Eternal and the profit-directing player non-profit on the studio’s website. If you’d like to get in on the ground floor as a player-stakeholder, Summer Eternal’s first product is actually a book.
The Summer Eternal Anthology Vol. 1 is one-half a collection of essays on the state of games and the industry, with guest writers and interviewees including the likes of Dragon Age scribe David Gaider and former Greek finance minister and Valve economist, Yanis Varoufakis.
The other half is a design document previewing and formally announcing Summer Eternal’s first game, Project Red Rooster. At the time of writing, the Anthology is available for preorder for one more day.