Unlike the traditional equity structures we are familiar with, Summer Eternal studio has a unique governance model based on the concept of "fair shares." It believes that the studio's organizational structure should cover all stakeholders, including the management cooperative, the contributor cooperative composed of employees and freelancers, and investors. Most breakthroughly, the player community is also included.
In the latter part of this player co-op announcement, the studio further explained:
"Typically, consumer cooperatives are organizations where consumers hold ownership of the businesses they patronize, but we have chosen to let players join a nonprofit organization. This means players will not receive personal profits, but they will have the right to decide how the organization's income is invested. Broadly speaking, this is a step towards repairing the trust issues plaguing the game industry. We hope to reverse the industry's entrenched mindset: no longer does the developer's responsibility to players end the moment the player hits the 'buy' button."
Summer Eternal is an RPG studio co-founded by former ZA/UM designers Argo Tuulik and Dora Klinčić, along with developer and operations lead Alexander Gavrilović (the speaker mentioned above). The first two developers were involved in the development of an expansion for Disco Elysium, which was ultimately cancelled. Given this experience, it's no surprise that they wanted to try a completely different financing and governance model for their new studio.
Employee-owned cooperatives are not common in the game industry, but they are not without precedent. However, Summer Eternal is taking bigger steps; it also plans to open up ownership and profit sharing to freelancers and players. The key point is that for players, this is not direct cash income, but rather grants them democratic say in the studio's direction, supported by rights to control 5% of the profits.
This reminds me of EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management or the player-voted new feature mechanism in Retro Jianghu, but Summer Eternal takes it a step further, truly putting its money where its mouth is. Nowadays, publicly traded game companies using traditional governance models are shrinking and cannibalizing their core businesses to fulfill their fiduciary duties to shareholders. In this industry context, such a groundbreaking approach in both economic and operational models may resonate more widely than ever before.
You can read Gavrilovic's full article on the studio's website to learn more about Summer Eternal's governance model and how this player-led nonprofit organization operates to allocate profits. If you want to get involved from the start as a player shareholder, Summer Eternal's first product is actually a book.
Half of "Summer Eternal Anthology Volume 1" is a collection of essays on the game ecosystem and the current state of the industry, featuring a strong lineup of guest contributors and interviewees, including Dragon Age writer David Gaider, former Greek Finance Minister and Valve economist Yanis Varoufakis, and other notable figures.
The other half is a design document that officially announces Summer Eternal's first game, Project Red Rooster, and reveals前瞻 content for the project. At the time of writing, there was only one day left in the pre-sale period for this anthology.