505's catalog contains games you may know: a mix of indie hits, critical darlings, break-out success stories, solid, but unremarkable, action games and hard-core niche shooters, including Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Terraria, Sniper Elite, Payday 2 and Cooking Mama, the weird little game that has become a worldwide phenomenon. Coming soon to that list will be Defense Grid 2.

The deal between 505 and Hidden Path will have just been announced at the time this story goes online. It's been in the works for months, signed for weeks and serves mainly to provide enough extra funding for Hidden Path to bring Defense Grid 2 to Xbox One and PlayStation 4, although 505 will have a piece of all of Defense Grid 2. The company doesn't go in halfway, but it also doesn't go in without "skin in the game" as Howe likes to say. The publisher stands to profit off Defense Grid 2, but it also stands to lose. Everyone is motivated. Everyone "has skin."

Hidden Path's deal making with 505 started much the same way as it did with Dengler. Pobst reached out and started a conversation — and got lucky again.

After a series of phone calls, short meetings and handshake agreements, Howe and 505's VP of product development, Kathleen Nicholls, flew up to Bellevue in the fall of 2013. The agenda was due diligence. Howe and Nicholls played the game, such as it was, talked to the team and examined the production materials. Then Pobst, Howe and Nichols adjourned to Pobst's office to talk numbers.

Pobst wanted to know how much money he could actually make working with 505. How much the publisher would take for itself, and how much would get lost in translation along the way. Pobst has done this dance on both sides. But what Howe answered with threw him for a loop. Howe didn't just answer the question, he answered directly, with precision. No ambiguity. He gave exact figures. And then he plugged in his laptop and opened up 505's P&L [profit & loss statement] to illustrate exactly where the money would come from and where it would go. No secrets, no bullshit.

It was "something that I have never, ever experienced in my entire career, both on the publishing side and on the developer side," says Pobst. "We both made guesses about forecasts, because that's what anyone does ... [but] it was so transparent. It was shocking."

Shocking because it's just never done. Pobst would know that, as the guy who was, once upon a time, frequently on the other side of that meeting, working at Sierra and then Microsoft. But Howe has been there too. He's from Activision, and although he's grateful for the experience, he's also not shy about throwing some of "big publishing's" business practices under the bus.

"[W]e had some very early success on the back of a core team of ex-Activision people," Howe tells me in the conference room at 505 headquarters. "We set out to be, at the very outset, a little bit different in terms of publishing. I'd come from that big publishing model where the relationship between publisher and developer was completely unequal, in terms of size of business. The relationship was according to that size. The leverage that the publisher brought to bear on the developer was significant."

The typical publisher-developer deal works like this: The publisher gives over some large sum of money and in return expects a large percentage of profits, occasionally some portion of ownership of the IP, possibly some portion of ownership of the entire development company and, on rare but notable occasions, basically anything else they might want. Some game publishing deals contain clauses reverting control of IP, or additional profit margin to the publisher if milestones aren't met or quality isn't where the publisher decides it wants it to be. And on even rarer — yet catastrophic — occasions, a publisher may seize control of an entire studio. Simply put: game development deals can be a minefield.

game development deals can be a minefield

"Probably the last three years at THQ, I saw a real shift in that mentality," Nicholls says. "Now, the correct way of doing it, if you're a publisher working with an external developer, is ... you treat them as if they're an internal studio. You treat them as if you're the same team. It's a complete partnership ... If you don't do that, if you play games, if you hide P&Ls, if you redact portions of budgets and all that kind of stuff, it just makes for ... you just don't get your best work out of people."

Howe describes what 505 does as a publisher as "the unsexy stuff that creative people don't want to do." This includes the marketing, the scheduling, the wheedling of console makers to get specs on minute items on various checklists and more — all of the business-y things that add up to real time and money if you don't know how to do them. Nicholls knows how to do all of them. She is the queen of the unsexy stuff.

"Most publishers just [say] 'I'll work with you, I'll screw you, I'll go to the next one and screw them too,'" she says. And, like Pobst and Howe, she would know. She's worked in the video game industry since 1993, starting in customer service at Broderbund. Since then she's been at LucasArts, LEGO and most recently the now-defunct THQ, where she was the "fixer," assigned to produce video games nobody else wanted to manage. Her last project at THQ, before the company went under, was South Park: The Stick of Truth.

"It's really hard to make the games," Nicholls says. "It's hard to get them out on the day that you need to get them out and not screw all of your advertisers because your date slipped by two weeks. You don't need to add lying and hiding on top of it. ... It's just too tiring."

At the due diligence meeting in the fall, Nicholls was looking for problems with the development of Defense Grid 2. She looked for the things she'd have to fix, if she was still the fixer, and the things she'd have to assign one of her producers at 505 to fix now that she wasn't. She didn't find any. Not a one.

Nicholls asked Defense Grid 2's Associate Producer Dacey Willoughby some basic questions about how tasks are tracked and processes managed. Out came the spreadsheet — the one Willoughby mouses over on the big TV screen back at the conference room at Hidden Path. It's the same spreadsheet she's adding to, updating and referencing throughout every meeting, all day, every day. As it turns out, it's not just any spreadsheet, but a work of logistical art.

"She got all geeky and pulled out the Excel spreadsheet," says Nicholls, "and I was like, 'Yay!' I love to see that stuff. If I can ask something like, 'How do you manage this?' Or, 'Beyond your high level milestones, where is all your task tracking and how do you do that?' If someone can pull it up quickly and speak to it, I don't even necessarily have to understand and believe in all the little details in it. It's the fact that they're confident enough that they can access it, pull it up and explain it to me immediately. That tells me all I need to know ... and she has just this monstrous spreadsheet."

Four hours at Hidden Path, in and out, and then Howe and Nicholls were back in the Uber car headed to Sea-Tac Airport to fly back to LA. They talked about the deal on the plane, compared notes about Hidden Path and decided right then and there: Let's do it.

Howe, still in the air, sent an email back to Pobst to clarify a few details. The next morning Howe was on the phone with his bosses in Italy. The deal came together not long after. To call it a love fest would not be too far off. And for Howe, that's exactly how he wants it.

"We were at DICE ... and met with a lot of developers," Howe says. We've been in the 505 conference room for over an hour, just chatting. He's so smooth it's felt like half that. "They said, 'What are you looking for?' Our answer is always the same: Good games. 'But what platform?' We're platform agnostic. 'What genre?' We're genre agnostic.

"We're looking for games that are fun, that really say something. They don't have to say anything particularly deep or meaningful, but they have to have a reason to exist."