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Comment by indigoabstract | Hacker News Reader

How the Japanese companies operate can be pretty strange from a non-Japanese perspective. I've read that Toru Iwatani, also from Namco, who designed Pac-Man, was not compensated in any way financially for the success of the game. He seems to have integrated better in the company's structure than Takahashi, but that may have been thanks to other skills besides game design.

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This is true in games companies in the west too. Personally I was not even allowed to be credited, and thanks to NDAs with other involved parties I cannot discuss the nature of the work either. This has the fun side effect that many of the things I actually did do sound like absolute nonsense and are externally unverifiable - not a recipe for a happy situation.

But I actually did fairly well. I know excellent devs that were making <$50k/year leading teams delivering hundreds of millions in revenue annually, and they maybe got another 10 days of vacation.

That sounds like a far from ideal situation. Credits should be mandatory IMO, since everyone appreciates them and they cost the company nothing. I'm fortunate to have had a better experience with that during my time in the games industry.

However, let's say that you come up with a game idea, design the game all they way until it ships and then it does gangbusters well, making the company millions and millions. Getting some serious appreciation doesn't seem far fetched in that case, like CliffyB and such got, to give an example. But if not that, at least some generous bonuses and promotions would be expected in an Euro-American company.

Apparently not for these 2 guys. That's what I was referring to.

Work for hire is very much a thing in the west. One of the things that drew creators to Image Comics was their policy of letting creators keep the rights to their creations -- something highly unusual in the industry at the time (and today), and certainly not practiced by Marvel or DC.

That sounds more like the movie industry approach.

In the games industry, that would probably only happen in you developed the entire game yourself and only needed a publisher. If you need to take payment in advance for development, you would also most likely lose the IP.

Both Takahashi and Iwatani were Namco employees, so they wouldn't get to keep any IP they developed within the company. But that doesn't stop the said company from giving them bonuses and promotions. Doesn't seem to have happened in their case.

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