Well, judging by software sales,  "The Sims 1" game, and the "sims franchise" are both the most popular ever in their category, outside Nintendo. 

I know, sales=/=quality, but surely they are a good indicator of having a frickin' huge fanbase, and making the most universally accepted games, thus making the List of Gaming Gods look something like this:

1.Miyamoto

2. Will Wright

3. everyone else, including Meier, Kojima, Molyneoux, Carmack, and whoever made WoW.

Apparently you missed out on many Will Wright games, and he's been makins some great games for nearly 20 years.

How can you discredit a game developer that single handedly created an entire gaming genre, you sir should take a look at some of the things this man has done.

You actually think the sims is a good game...? They milked it out more then Pokémon. I give him kudos for that.

He does.  I did a biography on him once--he  is offered very generous salaries, but he's got to be the most humble man I've ever met.  Despite his position at the company, he refuses to take a higher salary than the average developer at Nintendo.  He is the epitome of a man who does what he does simply for the pure enjoyment of it.

He's absolutely a multi-millionaire, thanks to residuals from all of his gajillion-selling games, but as far as salary, it may be hard to believe, but it's true.

For contrast, it is interesting to compare videogame designers to boardgame designers. Videogame designers can become millionares, if they are on top. The top boardgame designers are lucky to make a living doing it. Even then, they will end up having an estate of games that gets auctioned off, as happened with Sid Sackson, to pay the medical bills his family owed.

Is this directed at me?  And if it is, where did I mention The Sims was a great game?

actually, there is always something wrong with using wikipedia as a source. You should follow the source they used and use that. There is nothing wrong with using wikipedia as a quick reference but I would never use it as a serious source.

anyways, I have no clue what anyone makes, so my post is relatively useless.

Money is money, no matter where it comes from. I was talking about residuals(thanks for learning me that word lol) in some of my earlier posts. Would you want a high salary if you know most of your games tend to sell over 5 million without problems? Ok, I would, but I like €€

Anyway, I bet Miyamoto hates little cats, no one is THAT perfect!

"He's been making great games for nearly 20 years"

Perhaps you need to learn how to read before jumping to offense against me for little to no reason. Yeah, sims was great and so was black&white. But he also made a lot of crappy add-ons and stuff like that. Spore aint that great either.

Few of them actually make a fortune.
Carmack hit the jackpot because he was one of the founder and top shareholder of ID Software when Doom 2 and Quake were so successfull...

In the end those that make money are those who own a portion of the studio they work at and hit the jackpot when that studio is bought by another company....

Otherwise most studios can't afford to pay millions dollars salaries so the cash thay make is through stock options.

Miyamoto probably is very wealthy thanks to the nice ride the Nintendo stock had these last few years.

Pardo at Blizzard probably has a nice bank account too as these last years Blizzard has been awarding a lot of stock options and I bet he got a nice share of those...