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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

Obfuscation of revenue is a really bad idea, all the way to a federal criminal investigation.

The idea is that the continuity requirements should not be onerous, given the revenue, say, less than 1% of it, "a good problem to have".

Publishing a reasonable spec would be a part of that.

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Pretty sure that hasn't stopped Hollywood accounting for the last century, and I see no reason why EA can't pull off the same things that Warner Brothers has been doing.

Hollywood accounting is about hiding profit by making it look like all of the revenue was used for expenses. Hiding all of your revenue outright is a different ballgame and if it were easy to do legally Nintendo wouldn't be paying billions in taxes on it already.

This is unrelated to the thread. The point was obfuscation of the fact that the profit is from a specific copyrighted work. I.e. selling 600 versions of a game each with a different default skin hides no income from tax authorities.

You're referencing profit instead of revenue, which the thread was referring to. Again, you can't hide revenue as easily. Splitting it up 600 ways doesn't solve the problem that game XYZ sold 10 million copies from the 600 subsidiary distributors. Nintendo could hide the profit that way, saying the subsidiaries took 100% of the revenue as costs, but the total revenue can't be hidden. It's either a reported sale or not, there's not really a way to fudge that.

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