From: colin.buckley@rose.com (colin buckley)
Subject: Royalties/Profits
Organization: Rose Media Inc, Toronto, Ontario.
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 1992 21:03:44 GMT
X-Gated-By: Usenet <==> RoseMail Gateway (v1.70)


Date Entered: 12-21-92 15:54
My partner/artist and I recently finished a game and got into an argrument
over the split of the profits.  I understand music bands get <20% per album
profits.  There have already been posts about the video console industry
contracting a game for a flat fee.

How are royalties handled in the commerical and shareware game industry for
outside games?  I assume inhouse people get a salary and that's it.

My Graphic artist wanted 50% for the basic concept and the graphic
work.

Sob story below related to the above, read at own risk...

On completion of the game, when the question finally came up, I was shocked
he want 50%, and it left me almost speechless, and I basically ended
up agreeing to giving him 40% for ~1/2 a week worth of graphics and
coming up with the original concept ("Batting coach hitting baseballs
to an outfielder").  Where as I transformed that concept into the game,
created the levels and waves, did some "minor" graphic work (Title/Intro
Animation, Credits, High Scores, the fonts, created all the graphic
screen layouts, and I had to modify, capture, and convert his graphics
into a format I could use (which took half a day itself)), the game
programming, game animation based on his FLI's by trial and error,
documentation, research/marketing, sound effects, and I'm still not
done where as he has been for a while, I still have to deal with registration
(I did agree to do registration, but he never would have been able to anyways
as a copy for each person must be compiled.) and write up the "how the game
was made" text file.  All off the above took 3 weeks (minus 3 days when I was
sick of doing it) more than 6 hours a day, full time basically, while he's
spending those 6 hours in school.  I made the huge mistake of telling him
about the 3 days I did nothing, as he now seems to be under the impression
that I've done nothing.  My original prediction of "like one day"
to program this simple game didn't help either.  I don't think he
even understands the pain in the ass of debugging and getting what I typed
in that "one day" to work as intended.  Not to mention I had to
overhaul and rewrite the game itself when the original implementation
wasn't all that fun and added multiple balls.

He also fails to understand the months alone I spent programming and
debugging the VGA, Sound Blaster, Keyboard & Joystick drivers, and Input
routines using the drivers, the file extraction, memory routines, and the
impressive text display routines prior to starting the game.  If these
hadn't already been done the game would have taken a couple of months.

The above is all reusable in future games, so I have no problem
with a small royalty for those (assuming there are future games.)

We're offering source as the game is marketed as shareware, and if I wasn't
expecting more registrations for the source which I get all profits
for, he definately has the better deal.
.----------------------------------------------------.
| Colin Buckley                                      |
| Toronto, Ontario, Canada                           |
| InterNet: colin.buckley@rose.com                   |
|                                                    |
| So Eager to Play, So Relunctant to Admit it...     |
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