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Comment by crispyambulance | Hacker News Reader

    > I don't understand why the people who were let go didn't leave in the first place...

I feel the same way. One often hears the statistic that the games industry revenue (~36 Billion) exceeds that of the film (hollywood) industry.

It makes me wonder, given that there's probably fewer workers in games, who is making the lionshare of the money? Is it just a tiny sliver of investors? How did it get that way? One would think that talent could just walk away from toxic workplaces and be paid handsomely elsewhere.

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Once a game company has a hit they become their own angel investor and try to find the next hit. The odds are really low though so most die before finding it. It doesn't help that most companies have no idea why the first game was a hit.

It's easy to hide for a long time because a hit can be so profitable. Look at Riot Games. League of Legends remains their only product even after trying to find another one for a decade. Zynga is still around because in a few short years they got a couple billion in the bank.

I don't have any statistics but I'd guess a lot of the money goes to the publishers and IP/Licence holders.

Most game studios produce games on behalf of established publishers like EA with licenses from companies like Disney and I would assume they know to take a pretty piece of the cake.

I also have a feeling that the culture in the games industry have been rotting for a while and talent being "abused" has become the norm.

You can be a "rockstar" coder or coding "Wizard" all you want, but you'll probably never reach the paycheck of a good actor.

The burden of organizing a group of people large enough to make a triple A game is enormous. Revenues come after long, painful development periods only. Risk is high. It doesn’t surprise me at all that the workers get a tiny proportion, unsatisfactory as that is.

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