Lot of ifs, ors and maybes here. To me this is basically a loan and a temporary safety net, in addition to the usual publisher duties. But there's some things I don't get.
If per the Verge article above, "developers retain 100 percent of all intellectual property and full creative control of their work."
Does that mean they can release it on Steam if they want to?
Because if not, this next bullet point is going to be a bit hard to swallow:
"Developers earn a fair share for their work — once costs are recouped, developers earn at least 50 percent of all profits."
Sounds very generous, except for this part that Epic, like any publisher will be looking to recover:
"Epic Games Publishing will cover up to 100 percent of development costs, from developer salaries to go-to-market expenses such as QA, localization, marketing, and all publishing costs."
I don't mean to pretend to know anything much about the economics of game development, but that is a lot of money before the developer starts to see profits. It sounds like a dependency trap. Epic will get paid back first, and then the developer will see their 50%. If their game is sinkholed onto the unpopular Epic store, they'll likely never make the money back. And if they release elsewhere and it doesn't sell, they still won't get any real money. How do you make your next game during the time you're waiting on income? How do you retain your employees without crawling back to Epic or to another publisher? What happens if you want to go back to self publishing?
Not that I think Epic is trying to get away with wrecking developers while Tim Sweeny twirls his villainous mustache. Rather I think it's another example of the Epic "friend of the little guy" narrative that is a quite questionable and more complicated than Big Check = Big Good.
Also, I don't think these kind of deals are very good for making good games. It takes that pressure off of having to make something people will buy and play, which is a bad thing because your pay is no longer a reward for a good job. Who wouldn't want a fat check up front, of course, but I don't think it provides good feedback. Your actual execution doesn't matter much now that you've been very comfortably paid for not delivering a product yet.
Like if your boss paid you up front for the whole years work, honestly, how hard would you be working right now?
Which in a way is par for the course, because nobody wants to use their poor store. They have to buy developers because they seeming can't buy customers, even with free games. If you had to sell on Steam to actually reach customers to make your living, you'd wonder why you needed to sell on EGS at all, really.