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Comment by Closi | Hacker News Reader

Lots of companies have a bonus which is a combination of 'corporate wide' bonus, 'performance' bonus and 'personal contribution'.

This just seems to formalize some of the parts which are often just arbitrarily decided by some governance committee.

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No reason to not give the bonuses when accomplishments are recognized then, instead of tying it to the team's success at a singular date (delivery). It forces everyone to work in overdrive. It's plainly not a personal contribution/performance bonus at all. If CDPR makes a bad hire that causes a delay (even outside of development, like marketing?), then everyone suffers for that from a lack of a bonus.

This is particularly shitty when combined with the stress and demands and low pay of the game industry as it is.

Also, super curious if the tokens can be forged. Can I just show up at the end of release with 50 tokens and cash in? Surely they were tracking it elsewhere, making the tokens useless.

Plenty of companies recognise contributions by handing out tokens that can't be cashed in immediately, that have a value that depends on the fortunes of the company, and that might fall in value precipitously. Just usually they name the tokens "stock options" or "pre-IPO shares"

I agree there are plenty of shitty practices in the games industry, of course.

It would also be weird if managers were to capriciously hand out options to employees as short term performance bonuses.

Weird, normal-and-accepted, guess it depends what part of the industry you work in.

You've piqued my curiosity - where is this normal and accepted?

Normally at tech companies there’s a review and bonus twice a year. At ours we only participate in one of them, the other is done by management, and for most of my career ours would just pretend he decided to give us a bonus for our hard work one day. You had to ask around and notice it was always the same week to figure out how it worked.

In the US, those are regulated. I'm not aware of the details, but I doubt these "certificates" in Poland have the same level of regulation as US securities.

This merely makes these certificates worth less than the same but named stock options and regulated.

The employee will "just" need to discount the value of these certificates accordingly.

It’s pretty usual for a company financial target to need to be hit before the bonus payout starts - in fact it’s unusual for a bonus payout to happen regardless of financial performance (companies want to give employees certainty about what the rules are to trigger a bonus, but don’t want to have to give out bonuses if they are going under).

I’ll assume the bonus is probably actually tied to the companies financial performance rather than the release, but that the release was required for the revenue target to be hit.

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