Backlash Forces Amazon To Remove ‘Draconian’ Employee Game Development Policies

Every gamer, at one point or another, has probably dreamt about making their own game. With the recent rise in the popularity of indie games and with easily-accessible developer tools, more and more of those hopeful dreamers have begun making their dreams a reality. With the right team and plenty of resources, it’s easy enough to design a game that you think will become a hit.

Things, however, become infinitely more complicated when you’re actually working for a video game company and intellectual property rights come into play, especially when your company insists that they get a cut from any game that you develop during your free time, as was previously the case in Amazon Game Studios.

According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon previously required their developers to sign contracts that required them to distribute any personally-created games on Amazon’s platforms and provide the company with a royalty-free paid intellectual property license to the said games. The terms recently came to light after that part of an Amazon Games Studios contract was posted online, causing an uproar in the developer community.

Amazon has since amended the contract after being criticized by other game developers for their “draconian” policies. “These policies were originally put in place over a decade ago when we had a lot less information and experience than we do today,” said VP of Games at Amazon Frank Frazzini in an internal email,” and as a result, the policies were written quite broadly.”