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Soundwave on 25 June 2024
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Tico said:
Soundwave said:

Because people expect to be paid when they know they have made a hit game (Spider-Man 1) the first time around. 

Say you have a studio, maybe the first time out you have a hit game you can get by with everyone being young and just happy to have a job. 

But once you hit pay dirt with a hit game ... guess what? 

Now everyone wants to be paid more and fairly so, they want to be paid the same as other high end studios. They now have that hit game on their resume and can just leave your studio and go elsewhere and easily get a job somewhere else because everyone will see on the resume "hey you worked on Spider-Man on PS4, that was a big hit". 

If I'm a top end artist who is insanely talented and I know my work in the previous game is part of the reason the game looks great, yes you are going to pay me more for a sequel when I see the previous game sold like 10 million copies+. Industry workers talk easily enough too, if I find out someone doing the same job at me on say GTA6 is getting double my salary, I will ask for a raise too. That's not greed either, it's paying people their fair share, you want top end programmers, artists, etc., you have to pay to keep them. 

You want to keep talented teams like the ones that make the Spider-Man games together, you have to pay and the more success you have the less chance you have to being able to employ newbies in the business who will work for cheap. Otherwise those people will leave and then there is no guarantee whatsoever that future games will have the same quality. 

The best soccer team, Real Madrid, pays all the staff what they think is fair, not what the staff think is fair. And if there is someone who is not satisfied, the door is open for them to leave whenever they want. Those who leave are rarely for money, but for other reasons. And those who reject an offer from Real Madrid are rarely because of money, but rather for other reasons.

Self-awareness, the sense of self, is what moves people.

Of course money is necessary and is always taken into account. But I see little future for a company where people put money as the main thing.

Think you're confusing one thing ... in game development, your top artists/programmers/etc. are the PLAYERS. The staff are the ones that magic the games worth a damn, no one wants to play a Zelda game made by the Philips cd-i team, it's only because it's the EPD Zelda team that those games have any worth to begin with. 

So if you win a championship or they have high stats, in sports generally you have to pay your players more when their contract is up. 

In game development, most staff don't have contracts that last past a single game's development. So if the game is a hit, you're going to be paying more to keep those people. 

Or like in pro sports, when those athletes are free agents, lots of teams want them and are willing to pay them to come play for them instead. It's the same in the game business. 

There's a whole bunch of other practical issues too, like say you say "well just pay the head producer of the team and pay everyone else peanuts" ... well the head producer then goes "well I don't want to work here anymore, I like working with the staff I had, I'm going elsewhere". If I'm a top end producer/game designer, I don't want to work with a bunch of untalented people, I want talented staff around me, the same way a superstar player will want other talented players to play with in basically any team sport.