So in my internet travels I just came over this, regarding how Bethesda (and it's parent Zenimax) deal with third-party developers. A user seems to pretty much say how Bethesda managed to buy-out Arkane Studio during it's development of Dishonored:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=61569025&postcount=155

Check out this gem:

You guys know Bethesda owns Arkane, so they can make them do whatever they want them to do. During production of Dishonored, Bethesda started to arbitrarily reject milestones. In doing so, the then-independent-Arkane had to find ways to pay their staff since successful milestones are what feeds the bank. Knowing that Arkane wasn't making their milestones on time and potentially going to suffer internally, such as loosing staff, or ultimately shutting down, Bethesda's parent company Zenimax stepped in to help Arkane out by floating them loans during this "quality issue" period. That seemed nice of Zenimax to help out Arkane, right?

Now since Bethesda had been rejecting milestones because they didn't believe Arkane was maintaining the quality they originally promised, Arkane's also severely behind schedule because time has been spent correctly and addressing Bethesda's issues with previously rejected milestones.

Since Zenimax is also the company that's invested in Bethesda, they start telling Arkane they have serious concerns about their ability to finish the Dishonored. Even though they originally floating them loans to keep Arkane running, they now give them an ultimatum: pay back the loans or sell them the studio for some piddly amount. If Arkane doesn't do either, then Zenimax will take them court for breach of contract since they're now so far behind in the project.

Remember, it's because Zenimax's company Bethesda has been rejecting milestones that put Arkane behind in the first place.

The outcome is Arkane reluctantly sold their independence to Zenimax so they could continue the creative work they started and at the very least have public recognition for their efforts.

This is why Bethesda can tell Arkane to do whatever they want them to do now.

What would you do if you were making Prey 2 and started wondering why Bethesda was suddenly treating you differently? You'd start looking at past independent developers Bethesda has had deals with to understand if it's a developer issue or a publisher issue. When you discover Bethesda started to reject milestones at not only Arkane, but Splash Damage and inXile, you start to see a pattern. Knowing the fate of Arkane, if you were the Prey 2 developer would just sit there and see what happens or would you confront the publisher?

Certainly something for the business people at GOG to take into consideration if/when negotiating a contract for Bethesda to come to GOG, careful they don't try to slip in a nasty clause :)

Also :

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/what-went-wrong-with-human-heads-prey-2

Welcome to how the rich get/stay rich. Screw everyone below you.

Not really surprising tbh.
From their point of view, they probably realized Dishonored was going to be a pretty big hit, and they wanted their share of the profits to be as high as possible.
Screwing the devs over as much as possible to make as much money as possible is pretty much standard practice for the bigger publisher who only care about money.

I'm pretty sure companies like EA, Activision or Ubi Soft have done the exact same thing in the past.
The only thing that can protect you from it as a dev is to either stay far away from bigger publishers, or have enough of a rep and/or cash reserves that the publisher can't really afford to mess with you.

You pasted the article twice, might want to fix that.

Thanks man

Bethesda is a horrible company. Just as bad as EA. Is anyone else -not- surprised?

So no Morrowind and Daggerfall on GOG :(

their DRM love and pricing policy really, really puts them way way lower than Activision in my book.

Well, if what is claimed in that article is true, they are worse, I mean perhaps I'm wrong but I've never heard of EA or Activision actually flat-out refusing to pay devs' wages as per contract, but Beth obviously in this case seems to have gotten away with it because the devs were Russian and it was an obscure game.

Also the stuff about Arkane is even worse, the whole thing of refusing to pay milestones and loaning them money seems to have been a deliberate force Arkane to sell themselves to Bethesda to survive.

It's strange when you think about it, but it happens from time to time. Even in television industry, as far as I recall some major station refused to pay for scripts for a show they ordered.

It goes beyond my imagination, because it's not like they can't afford to pay. They seem to don't pay because they want to show them who's the boss.

Nevermind, stupid mistake. Zenimax owns id, not Bethesda.

Zenimax does own Bethesda AND id.

Daaamn; that's awful. I have to admit I knew next to nothing about Bethesda as a publisher, and I was pretty sweet on them for, well, releasing Dishonored. No more I suppose.

Arkane deserve better (seriously, I LOVE Dishonored), I suppose no one's safe in the AAA publisher model.

I originally meant to say that Bethesda owns id, but that's obviously not the case.