"But Takahashi ended his involvement with the franchise and its publisher, Bandai Namco, long ago. He continues to live in the shadow of the katamari, experiencing the strange conditions of an industry where artistic creations become valuable intellectual property for companies. He says he does not receive any royalties from the sales of Katamari games."
He was a full-time employee of Namco at the according to another part of the article. Do game producers get royalties for IP they come up with in a large company? I'm guessing no.
I sat next to a guy who made one of the arcade titles at Namco and the primary benefit to him was he got the opportuntiy to come to work at their USA R&D office. The Japanese employees got paid a lot more to work in the USA (though still less than Americans in the same office) and had a car and housing allowance and (if you see this as a benefit) got to live in America for a while. The pay if they stayed in Japan to work at the home office was pretty low, even compared to programmer/designer salary in a LCOL area of the USA, according to one of the guys who told us this over after work drinks.
>Do game producers get royalties for IP they come up with in a large company? I'm guessing no.
Should they though? We treat the games industry just like any other software, but really games as a business are a lot more like Hollywood movies. They have a release date, a hype cycle, a launch, and they either flop or succeed. It's not like a SAAS that chugs along generating value for years. Why shouldb't the creators receive royalties just like a film writer?
i am all for sharing profit among employees, but who are the creators? of a game or movie? on large productions there are hundreds of people. which of them are responsible for its success? and what about those who work on productions that were not successful?
there are probably a few people who are somewhat directly responsible for the success, graphic designers, directors, writers, lead actors, but everyone else just contributes whatever they are asked to do.
is it fair that those who get assigned to work on a successful production get a share of the profit, while those who got assigned to work on an unsuccessful one don't?
in the end, a success should be seen as the success of the whole company, and profit should be shared with everyone, and not just those who were lucky to work on the production that made the profit.
They used to. When I first started in the games industry the creators got a significant royalty. But back then it might have been one primary creator who probably did a lot of the dev as well.
