r/beyond_all_reason

This document was leaked by a concerned contributor to the GRU discord (join us here: https://discord.gg/Q7qpmAvCXY ).

The text of the leaked document outlining the betrayal and effective exploitation of people contributing to what they thought was a free open source project (spoiler: its registered in NL as a for profit company!!!) is below. One further not, you will notice that this excludes all the original devs for spring engine and balanced annihilation (BA), these devs wrote 95% of the code for BAR and will receive $0.00. This is beyond concerning.

The leaked text:

[This is an official statement from the admins as of May 7th 2026]

Dear Contributors,

Following the April 15th statement and the very lively discussion that came out of it, we promised another drop to come shortly as we lock down the remaining open points of the publishing agreement so this round of comms can be substantive, having all cards on the table so everyone in the team is able to make an informed decision about their involvement with the project going forward.

The agreement is now sufficiently developed on the legal front we are comfortable with making firm statements about the details. We are aligned within the admin team on signing it in the coming weeks, but we have deliberately parked it to attend to homework, the most important part is having these conversations with the team. We do not want to put pen to paper before talking with you, addressing the big questions still hanging in the air, and getting an actual read on the team’s sentiment, similar to what we did with the Head of Operations appointment. The plan is to again run a survey, evaluate our mandate in doing these moves, and only then proceed.

A reminder up front: this message is for the contributor team. Some elements (notably the publisher's identity, which we share below) are okay to discuss internally and in our dev channels, but please avoid mentioning them to the public for now. We are very grateful the earlier information has been kept internal, a testament to how seriously the team is taking it. We'll handle the wider community comms if the deal is signed and we will do a controlled rollout.

Contents of this round of comms:

We have compiled a list of the most popular questions that remained unanswered in previous updates. The list is based on the BAR Organisational Future thread, the DMs we received and partly things that might have not been raised, but we believe would be helpful to disclose at this point.

- Publisher’s identity

- How money flows, what the publisher’s cut applies to, what the funding can be spent on

- Equity and shareholding, the structure, the reasoning behind it, and the protective rules around share transfers

- Free version on Steam, cosmetics?

- Donation fund relief

- Volunteer work policy

- Where we want to go from here

Addressing some of the things we failed to properly convey in previous comms:

1) The publisher-or-death binary:

There may have been some imbalanced framing on our part, indirectly implying that the publishing deal is the only way for BAR to meaningfully move forward. That may have been read between the lines simply because of our own excitement around the opportunity, so it is worth clarifying.

This is not a binary between “publisher deal” and “BAR stays at its current pace forever.” Even without a publisher, BAR is already set up to move faster than it has been, because the Head of Operations role and the internal process work around it are happening either way. What the publisher specifically unlocks is a different gear. It gives us the ability to take on Steam-scale work that volunteer time cannot reasonably absorb, such as full-time campaign work, dedicated infrastructure capacity, sustained client/UI development, and similar long-running production needs.

So if the survey result is a firm no and we walk away from the deal, we are not back to square one. We would still be moving faster than 2024-2025 BAR was, just without the funded-team layer on top.

2) In the April 15 statement we called the publisher path "non-controversial and low-risk”. The first half of that has clearly not aged well, the chat since has shown plenty of controversy, and rightly so. We stand by "low-risk" in the specific sense of being lower-risk than the alternatives we evaluated, given the goal of putting BAR out on Steam properly, but we should have been more careful with "non-controversial". That word implied a settled position the team did not yet have. Apologies for the loose framing, that is on us.

Let us cut to the chase then and finally reveal all the juicy info you were waiting for!

Who is the publisher?

The publisher is Hooded Horse (Hooded Horse Inc., a Texas corporation). For those unfamiliar, though we suspect a lot of you already are given the audience this project attracts, Hooded Horse is a publisher specialising entirely in strategy games. Their catalogue is a who-is-who of recent indie strategy hits; HOMM: Olden Era, Manor Lords, Old World, Terra Invicta, Falling Frontier, Against the Storm, Songs of Conquest, Distant Worlds 2, and many more. If you play strategy games on Steam, you have very probably bought one of theirs.

They have one of the cleanest reputations of any publisher currently operating in the strategy space, perhaps the cleanest. They are known for being developer-friendly to a degree that is genuinely unusual: hands-off on creative direction, unusually transparent (several of their other publishing contracts are publicly available, which is almost unheard of in this industry), and consistently spoken about positively by the developers they have worked with. They do not push studios around on game design, they understand strategy audiences, and they have specifically built their model around long-tail support for niche genre titles instead of chasing a quick hit. The way they operate is, in many respects, exactly the model we would have hoped for if we had been able to design our ideal publisher from scratch.

Why Hooded Horse specifically, out of the offers we evaluated? They were the closest fit on every axis that mattered to us. No IP transfer, comfortable with the free-version commitment, comfortable with our open-source/GPL legacy and the licensing setup, pragmatic about an unusual project with a unique history, and willing to negotiate the kind of terms (safe off-ramp, license-only, contributor-friendly framing) that other publishers either could not or would not match. The fit on values, as much as on commercial terms, is what tipped the decision.

Even by their already pretty developer-friendly baseline, the terms we ended up with are noticeably more pro-dev than what they normally do. They went out of their way to accommodate what we needed, in places where the boilerplate would not normally bend. That part of the negotiation took time, which is part of why this has all been slow, and it is also why it was worth waiting to get right.

A few of you in the thread had guessed correctly from the hints we were dropping here and there. You can put on your “I told you so” cap now! :D

How the money would flow in such deal

Plenty of speculation around this in chat, so let us go through it properly.

Revenue split with the publisher

We are not going to publish the exact percentages negotiated with Hooded Horse, that part is covered by the NDA, like in any other publishing agreement but it is safe to call it “very fair” for what they bring to the table. A part that’s worth mentioning is there is a step-down baked in as well, which means as we go the Publisher's share of revenue diminishes, unlocking more funds to flow directly into the project.

The revenue share with Hooded Horse applies only to the commercial Steam product, i.e. revenue from the paid game (and any future paid DLC under the same arrangement) sold via Steam and equivalent storefronts. It does not apply to:

- Donations to BAR. Those continue to flow into the BAR organisation directly and are ring-fenced for the Community Fund (tournaments, events, contributor tooling, server-host safety net, etc.) under our shareholder agreement.

- Other sources like a merch store - 100% of merch revenue stays with BAR, this is explicitly carved out of the publishing agreement.

- Future ventures outside the Steam product - Anything materially new (transmedia, sequels, unrelated products) sits outside this deal unless we choose to bring it in via a separate agreement.

In other words, the publisher participates in the commercial Steam product they are helping us bring to market. Everything else BAR does (the donation-funded community side, the merch store, future projects) stays separate.

Once the money lands at BAR Team B.V., what we do with it is fully under our control through our internal Shareholders’ Agreement (SHA).

The internal commitment is:

- After the commercial release, at least 75% of the net revenue BAR receives from the first year will be reinvested: development, infrastructure, compensation, the free version, premium content, community-facing spending, runway and administrative costs.

- For the time after, we commit to prioritise continued improvement and operation of BAR going forward.

Regardless of how successful the game becomes, the SHA structurally prevents this from turning into "the admins quietly siphon off the revenue." The legal default is that the money goes back into BAR. Dividends are possible only after the reinvestment floor is satisfied and only with proper Board / shareholder approval. The practical business reality will probably be that way more than the minimum gets reinvested.

So to finally address the elephant in the room - yes, the BAR organisation is and will be a for-profit venture, there is no denying that, but in practice the balance is strongly towards making the best game we can possibly make, leveraging the opportunity the publishing funding unlocks.

What the funding can be spent on

Worth flagging directly, because some people in chat assumed otherwise: the publisher does not dictate how we spend the development funding. There is no clause that says "X% has to go to the campaign" or "you must hire a dedicated writer with this slice." We decide internally, in line with our production plan and what the project actually needs at any given moment. Campaign work, lobby and matchmaker, infrastructure, art, Lua, engine, compensation, tooling, accessibility work, localisation, QA, all of it is fair game and prioritised by us.

Concretely, on the campaign side, we want to push for something far beyond a series of skirmishes with a story stapled on. We are aiming for a proper progressive galaxy map, a real narrative with characters and voiceover, cinematics, and the kind of meta layer that makes the whole thing feel like a single story rather than a mission list. None of that is realistic in a 2-hours-after-work-on-a-Wednesday volunteer model, that is exactly the kind of work the funding is meant to make possible. The campaign is one of the biggest prizes here, and we want to do it right.

Same logic applies on the infra and client side, powerful visual presentation, proper Steam integrations and marketing, quality assessment, compliance and legal layer, and the list goes on. Every one of these has been yearning for sustained, full-time attention rather than evening-and-weekend volunteer time. The funding lets us actually staff those properly.

Donation fund, reimbursement of setup costs

Some of the legal, notarial and corporate setup costs incurred over the past year (legal, negotiation costs, company structure work, contract review, now also the paid Head of Operations who spent some of their time on it etc.) were covered out of the donation pool. We were never fully comfortable with that, since donations are not meant to fund the commercial side of the project. Those costs will be reimbursed from the Publishing fund as soon as we sign, to free up these funds for where they belong to be allocated.

Combined with the Community Fund direction we floated in the April 15 addendum, this should give us a meaningfully larger pot to use proactively for things people actually care about: tournaments, community get-togethers, contributor tooling and software licences, server-host safety net, and so on.

Equity, share transfers, and why it is structured this way

This is the topic that has generated the most heat in #dev-organisation since April 15, and it deserves a proper answer.

The current equity structure

BAR Team B.V. up to now has been held by IceXuick alone (a holdover from when the company was set up and we needed someone to legally hold it). As mentioned in the January 15 statement, the plan was always to split that ownership across the admin team to fix the bus-factor-of-one situation. With Tarnished Knight joining the admins, we are now five.

What this equity actually represents (and what it does not)

Reading "five people split 100% of equity" and immediately thinking "so five people are about to cash out on a community-built project" is a fair instinct. We want to address that framing carefully.

What equity in BAR Team B.V. actually is:

- Governance and legal responsibility. Shareholders are the people who can be sued, audited, hauled in front of tax authorities, called to sign agreements and held personally accountable for the company’s decisions. Right now that risk has been carried entirely by IceXuick. Splitting it five ways is mostly about distributing legal exposure and decision-making authority across people who are already shouldering the project.

- Decision power over BAR’s direction. Big calls (signing this kind of deal, hiring, scope decisions, IP defense, what the campaign should look like) require strong shareholder alignment that is practical to reach. This is already a hard task with 5.

- A theoretical share of any future profit. This is the part that gets a lot of attention in the discussion. It is real, but heavily constrained: by the SHA reinvestment floor, by Dutch corporate law on dividend tests, and by the asset-light, licence-restricted nature of the company itself. Most of BAR Team B.V.’s potential value is locked in trademarks and goodwill rather than tradable assets.

What it is not, equally importantly:

- A payout structure for past contributions. We are not pretending it is. Founder shares in any company represent who is on the hook going forward, rather than a retroactive accounting of who did what.

- A fixed split that will stay the same forever. New shareholders added in the future could be brought in. The structure is not set in stone and we can rethink it in the future.

Why not a contributor equity pool?

This was the most consistent ask in the thread: "surely you could carve out X% for past contributors as a pool." We thought hard about this and concluded that a formal pre-allocated equity pool is a worse mechanism than the alternatives, for these reasons:

- Defining "contributor" fairly is genuinely impossible - BAR has had over 150 named contributors, plus uncounted Recoil contributors whose work BAR runs on, plus people who came and went, plus people who did massive work and left on bad terms, plus people who showed up for two PRs that turned out to be load-bearing. Any algorithm we try (commit count, hours logged, role, tenure) breaks immediately on real cases. Doing this badly would create more bitterness than not doing it at all.

- Equity creates governance noise that hurts the project - Every shareholder is a vote. A 50-person cap table on a small company that needs to move quickly on big decisions is operationally painful.

- The mechanisms we have are better targeted to the real concerns - The recurring concerns we hear are: "will admins quietly cash out at the expense of the project," "will the free version get squeezed," "will past contributors be forgotten when paid roles get handed out." Those are addressed by, respectively, the SHA reinvestment floor, the binding free-version protections and the contributor-first hiring policy (April 15 statement). Handing out shares is a worse fit for any of these problems than the dedicated mechanism is.

Right of First Refusal, share transfer rules

A separate but related concern: "what stops admins from selling their shares to a random VC tomorrow?"

The SHA puts the following structure on share transfers (committed in writing, drafted with our lawyer, and binding on every current and future shareholder):

- No unilateral transfers. Any shareholder wanting to sell has to issue a formal Transfer Notice covering price, terms and any proposed buyer.

- Existing shareholders get first refusal. The other admins get to buy at the same price first, pro-rata.

- Ownership caps and lock-ups apply. To prevent a single admin or coordinated group from quietly taking control through this route, there are caps on how much any single buyer (or coordinated group) can acquire, plus a lock-up period after acquisition.

- If existing shareholders don't purchase the shares they get announced in private contributor spaces first.

- Outside sales are the last resort. Only if both ROFR steps don't fill the offered shares can a sale to a third party even be attempted, and that sale is still subject to Board approval and the buyer signing a deed of adherence to the SHA. Anti-circumvention rules block the obvious workarounds (nominees, options, holding companies set up to evade the ROFR, etc.).

We explicitly do not want shares ending up with outsiders. The structure is designed so that if anyone among the current holders ever wants out, the shares stay either with the remaining admins or get announced for sale to the contributor base in private dev spaces.

Selling BAR to an outside buyer is not a path we are leaving open as a default.

Free version, Steam and cosmetics

The free version will also be on Steam (via the demo)

A piece that has been getting twisted in chat: "Steam will be paid-only, the free version is being shoved off-platform." Not the case.

The plan is for the Steam demo to effectively be the free version. Same multiplayer, same matchmaking, same volunteer-built content base, just packaged through Steam’s demo system because that is the mechanism Steam gives us for shipping a free, full-featured client alongside a paid SKU. People who want to stay on the website launcher can do so, with full feature parity. People who want to play through Steam without buying anything can do so via the demo.

Steam-platform conveniences (friends list integration, achievements, cloud saves, etc.) come from the platform itself, so demo users get them too. The paid version’s value-add is the premium single-player content and anything specifically funded by the publisher. The multiplayer experience itself remains free, and accessible via Steam.

Cosmetics

Cosmetics came up a few times in chat (mostly half-joking, but the question underneath was real): is BAR going down a "commander skins, hats, paid-currency cosmetic store" monetisation route as part of this?

Short answer: most likely not, that is not the focus. Cosmetics are an interesting space and we are not ruling them out, but the direction we are leaning toward is treating them mostly as rewards earned through achievements and gameplay, so they reward people who play and contribute to BAR. Some paid cosmetics may end up existing later (special editions, support-the-project bundles, that sort of thing), but they are not part of the core revenue plan and they are not what is funding this project. The core revenue model remains the one-time-purchase Steam version, plus future expansions/DLC under the same arrangement.

Volunteer contributions policy

A lot of the discussion circled around one question: "what is the actual policy on volunteer contributions once paid work exists?" I have answered this in chat several times, but it deserves a summary in this statement:

- We do not solicit volunteer work to fill gaps that paid work could fill. If a piece of work is essential and budgeted for, it is paid work, and a paid personnel will do it. The project will not be designed around a volunteer-fills-the-cracks model.

- We do not turn away volunteer contributions from people who want to contribute knowingly. If you have read this statement and the April 15 one, you understand the project is now partly a commercial product, and you still want to contribute under those terms, that is your right. After this round of comms and conclusion the for-profit environment will be made clear to outside incoming contributors and the whole community as well. We will not refuse PRs from informed adults who want to make the game they love better.

- Significant gap-filling work that the project actually needs from a specific person, the kind of thing where we would say "we really need someone to do X, and you are uniquely placed to do it", will be commissioned, with prior agreement on compensation.

- Existing contributors get hiring preference. This was in the April 15 statement and stays. If a paid role exists and you are already doing it well, you are first in line.

We acknowledge the model carries an asymmetry that some people have correctly named. Paid contributors get paid, volunteer contributors do not, and they will sometimes be in the same room working on the same product. We are choosing this model anyway because the alternatives (refusing all volunteer contributions; refusing publisher funding; trying to retroactively monetise everyone’s past work) are each worse for the project and most of the team. If you fundamentally disagree with this model, the survey is the place to say so.

A more empathetic framing of why this is happening at all: the volunteer model has done amazing things, but it has also hit a real ceiling on certain kinds of work. There are problems on this project where the answer "after work on Wednesday I will make a widget to adjust this one thing" no longer cuts it, the work needs sustained, full-time attention from someone who can actually hold the whole thing in their head for weeks at a time. People are not drones, and we cannot ask anyone to live that way for free. The publishing deal is, more than anything, the way we unblock that category of work without burning anyone out trying to do it on their evenings.

Asking for the mandate

As mentioned at the top: we want to measure the team’s sentiment before signing, the same way we did with the Head of Operations appointment. The survey this time is short and focused.

Structure

1. Stance on signing: For / Against / Neutral.

2. Continuation intent: "If the deal goes ahead, how likely are you to continue contributing to BAR over the next year?".

3. Long-form concerns and questions: Anything not addressed in this statement or previous ones that you still want answered. We will compile and respond, the same way we did for the Head of Operations discussion.

We realise there is realistically no version of this where everyone is happy. The discussion already shows a spectrum from "this is the best possible compromise" to "the whole direction is wrong." We respect both ends. What we are looking for is a clear-enough mandate that proceeding does not mean steamrolling a meaningful minority. The last thing we want is to tie our lives and careers for years forward working on something that carries with it the resentment of those who built it with us. The survey is linked at the end of this statement.

To protect the integrity of the process, signing in is required in order to participate and prevent duplicate or fraudulent voting. However, responses themselves are anonymous by default. If you would like your response to be identifiable (so the admin team can follow up with you directly on specific concerns), you can choose to fill in the optional Nickname field. The results of this survey will be shared with the team afterwards as totals. Contents of long-form responses will remain confidential between the responder and the admin team, with anonymised themes and admin replies published in the follow-up. Also importantly, the responses can be edited, feel free to make a provisional choice and edit it later if you changed your mind.

Let’s talk this through

Some of these topics are much easier to talk through than to read through. Two voice meetings are planned in the next two weeks:

- Thursday May 7th 9PM CET - general meeting to talk through the above

- Thursday May 14th 9PM CET - tentative follow-up meeting with a special guest! We are exploring the possibility of having the publisher join this one directly to talk with the contributor team and answer questions about how they operate, what their plans for BAR are, and whatever else you want to ask them. We think a proper introduction is in order.

What happens next

- Today through the next week: read this statement, ask questions, attend the voice meetings and respond to the survey when you feel you are making an informed decision.

- After the survey closes: we compile results and follow-up Q&A, post a response (same format as the Head of Operations one), and assuming the mandate is there, move to signing.

- Signing window: if the mandate is there, we don’t want to keep the pen hanging for too long as we obviously want to inform everyone else about the news. The expectation is days/weeks, rather than months from here.

- Finally a public-facing announcement coordinated with Hooded Horse on rollout. We will also welcome your input on our draft.

Final remarks and survey link

Thanks to everyone who took the April 15 statement seriously enough to argue with it for two weeks straight. The chat since then has not always been comfortable to read, but these conversations are crucial to have now. Several of the changes in this statement exist because of points that came out of that thread. Even where we disagreed, the pushback has been instrumental in how we navigated through the negotiations shaping the deal to offer the best future of the project for everyone involved.

Closing on a personal note. Stripping away the legal and process side of this, the deal we have managed to negotiate is, in many ways, the best-case scenario for a project of our shape: a publisher who actually gets us, a values fit on the things that matter, no IP transfer, free version protected, off-ramp in place, and a funding structure where we get to decide what to build with the money.

Inside the admin team, after months of evaluating all opportunities in front of us, this is the one scenario we believe gives BAR the strongest possible future without selling out anything that makes BAR what it is. I am proud of what we put together, and I cannot wait to start this new episode.

Thank you for your attention.

Survey link

Discussion

Feel free to also reach out through DM to the admins.