Nobody is going to accuse Amazon Game Studios of being a house of ideas, considering the studio has already been exposed as a place where trends are chased and games get cancelled the moment they’re unpopular. This notion was reaffirmed when a software engineer at Google shared a part of a contract AGS employees have to sign last month that requires workers making games in their time off to use Amazon products and services, distribute their personal game on Amazon-owned platforms, and automatically provide Amazon with a royalty-free, fully paid-up license to all of their intellectual property rights to whatever game they were making on their own time.
As one might expect, the revelation of this part of the employment contract raised a furor among some industry game devs, who called the terms “draconian” and prompted the sharing of other questionable employment contract terms from other studios, while still other devs called Amazon’s terms completely normal. The exposure was big enough for AGS to take notice, however, and the studio has since eliminated those terms from employment contracts.
An internal email to AGS staff written by studio boss Frank Frazzini explains, “These policies were originally put in place over a decade ago when we had a lot less information and experience than we do today, and as a result, the policies were written quite broadly.”
