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Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

This is the gist of it - at this point he could have requested royalties and probably would have gotten them. Otherwise he was a salaried designer for a title whose success was improbable.

I guess everyone could ask for a "if an idea of mine hits $10M of sales get 0.5%" clause in their contracts with a low risk to the employer, but then it's virtually guaranteed that he was one of dozens whose ideas went into this, 20x0.5% is a lot.

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It’s not really low risk to the employer - with all the employees and projects it’s guaranteed to hit and the company has to pay out.

Of course, recognizing unexpected success just is what profit sharing is designed to do.

Well, an individual project doing well doesn't mean the company made a profit.

As usual, huge profits are made by taking on risk. These publishers are ok to lose money on a bunch of things because it will be paid back on the random unpredictable wins. If everyone requested some term of "if it's successful, I want the profits", then your risk free salary would be reduced.

When there's extremely abundant capital available the opportunity for the business owners to take that kind of risk is valuable and the creative artist responsible for fulfilling that opportunity deserves a fair equitable share of the revenue that results.

And they are completely free to add whatever terms they want to their employment contract, or to go solo and take all of the risk and all of the profit. What more would you want?

Namco didn't have abundant capital

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namco#Financial_decline_and_re...

When there's abundant capital available then there's still a price for that capital.

But that's just "there's money; I should have some", which is understandable, but doesn't have a good enough grounding in reality. More fundamentally: there is a market for talent. If no other artists are willing to work without this benefit then one of two things will happen. Either this benefit will be added to artists' contracts, or the projects won't happen in the first place because they will never make enough money to be worth the investment.

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