Based on his royalty agreement ($7.50 per unit) and the stated total sales of around 100,000 units, he made $750,000 in royalties. Nice! Sorta wish I got royalties for my projects....
And those are 1987 dollars. That's roughly $1.4 million today.
Do people still do royalty based contracts? I wish they did.
i've had a couple proposals for projects that offered a perpetual royalty instead of upfront payment. i had to weigh the cost of development against the feasibility of the product "taking off" or just dying on the table and earning nothing.
We get royalty money in the games industry. Of course it depends on the project deal, but often once the game has sold a certain number of units royalty checks start coming in. For very successful games these checks can be quite large.