{"id":1905,"date":"2012-05-17T13:45:01","date_gmt":"2012-05-17T12:45:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1905"},"modified":"2012-05-17T13:45:01","modified_gmt":"2012-05-17T12:45:01","slug":"how-much-royaltybonus-for-successful-aaa-video-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2012\/05\/17\/how-much-royaltybonus-for-successful-aaa-video-game\/","title":{"rendered":"How much royalty\/bonus for successful AAA video game?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus.<\/p>\n<p>But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher&#8217;s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out at &#8220;$0&#8221;) &#8230; it&#8217;s interesting to see what they get.<\/p>\n<p>So, for Call of Duty, we have: <a href=\"http:\/\/documents.latimes.com\/infinity-ward-2003-bonus-plan\/\">Infinity Ward&#8217;s 2003 royalty deal with Activision<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>NOTE: that doc *does not include* bonuses; it mentions them a few times, and says they&#8217;re taken out &#8220;before&#8221; the royalties. One of the publisher tricks is to award 100% of the profit to their own executives as &#8220;bonuses&#8221; &#8211; so that the external developer gets a royalties based off $0. You&#8217;d really want to see the bonuses doc too to check what the value of these royalties is&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that aside, some headline points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>no upside limit (royalties aren&#8217;t &#8220;capped&#8221; &#8211; a sneaky practice I&#8217;ve seen publishers use before. A dev studio should NEVER accept a cap!)\n<li>NEW game series \/ IP created <b>by the developer<\/b>: developer gets 10% of net income (profit)\n<li>Sequels to the developer&#8217;s NEW games, or NEW games that re-use the developer&#8217;s game-engine, and <b>NOT made by the developer<\/b>: developer gets 2% of net income (profit)\n<li>Sequels made to the developer&#8217;s EXISTING games <b>by the developer<\/b>: developer gets 10-15% of net income (profit)\n<li>Sequels made to the developer&#8217;s EXISTING games and <b>NOT made by the developer<\/b>: developer gets 4% of net income (profit)\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something like 90% of game developers NEVER get a royalty for their games, and almost as many never get a bonus. But for the handful that work on titles where the studio negotiated a good deal (modulo the Publisher&#8217;s legal team using legal chicanery to make all royalties work out at &#8220;$0&#8221;) &#8230; it&#8217;s interesting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}