vonAchdorf
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2014
- Messages
- 13,465
the employed programmer generally has no rights on what he codes for his employer, therefore his compensation has to include that somehow.
That's true. For purposes of this article, however, I'm just looking at this from a financial perspective. From that perspective, the rights to the game only matter in terms of the money that the game produces for the rights-holder. If owning the rights to the game does not provide wages equivalent to what one would make working on someone else's game without owning the rights, then it's a net loss.
(There are other, less hard-nosed perspectives, of course, ones which would assign a value to intangible factors like the satisfaction of complete creative control and the pride that comes from being synonymous with the game itself. Needless to say, I value these intangibles quite a lot--they're a huge part of the reason I'm an indie developer!)
Yes, you are right about using those to calculate the (hypothetical) costs of a game if done by a third party, it's just that words like "fairly" trigger me
I'm looking forward to the sales figures and hope they allow you to go full-time with your game development. You had some cautious remarks in the piece about lacking polish impeding sales numbers, but I hope, it worked out for you anyway!
In the long run, you'll probably want to move away from AIR, which will certainly require additional resources.