Not only do they make some of the lowest salaries in the industry, they work the longest hours as well. Employers that allow people to "work on their passions" use that as a bargaining chip to lower salaries.
([1] "And don't try to bypass it by building in another country and then come to sell your wares here")
There is a reason this is not what laws look like.
Hollywood is already one step ahead of you [1]. No reason game studios wouldn’t follow suit, given a law like that to incentivize them.
In part, this is because so many people were burned in the past that it's now standard for contracts to include provisions specifying which profits the talents/investors are getting a % of. There's also many A-list talent that simply refuse to work for a studio which uses Hollywood accounting. And finally, the public-trading status of so many studios today basically renders Hollywood accounting impossible at a legal and financial level.
But the primary killer of the Hollywood accounting system is the big switch to streaming, in which royalties/etc are paid upfront (at a time-value discount) rather than over time, which essentially eliminates all of the opportunity to include "costs" (like usurious interest or marketing expenses) that had been used to generate paper losses on otherwise successful films.
And more importantly, unlike Hollywood talent, game developers and anime animators as a group have never been entitled to a share of the profits of the products they helped create.
If not, then it seems like someone else is taking all the risk but the employees are reaping all the rewards.
It would be great for me personally if my employer was forced to share his profits with me during the good times. But the reality is that during the hard times - when there's a global pandemic for example - he's the one who has to remortgage his house and max out his credit cards to make payroll, whereas I'm just a guy who can walk away with a month's notice.
At the moment, the risk/reward equation is unbalanced. For owners, it goes from outsized risk at startup to outsized reward at success; for employees, it goes from outsized risk at startup to moderate risk at success
If a startup fails:
Founder loses two years, his life savings, and gets paid nothing.
Employee loses two years, keeps his life savings, and gets paid salary for that time.
Completely different risk propositions.
What, you mean, like, bailouts? Because we do bailouts. Only difference is that, while the taxpayers pay, they see no return.
Artificially supporting failing businesses has negative consequences upon society, supporting a struggling individual has positive benefits to society.
That's because corporate limited liability shields stakeholders from losses beyond their sunk costs.
As an employee, you probably are close to last in line behind most of the other creditors, and may have to just write off that last (missed) paycheck. But that paycheck you are never going to get is the full extent of your liability for the company's losses, even theoretically.
Not that it encompasses all the risks you're exposed to (time not working, looking for a new job, etc.) But those are the same regardless.
you're simply making things up. stop it.
you can look up the hierarchy of creditors, and see where employee compensation lands. they're fourth priority, after domestic support obligations (probably not relevant to a business), administrative expenses (gotta pay the courts and court-appointed bankruptcy trustee), and claims from involuntary bankruptcy.
employee benefits are in the fifth priority. there are four more priority levels (6 through 10), and then all of the unsecured creditors.
Sure, technically employees are near the top, but that doesn't help if all the cash and assets are long gone.
On the one hand we want to incentivize risk-taking and entrepreneurship. On the other, we recognize that it takes a village to launch a successful company, and we want to share the wealth.
On the one hand we recognize that all work is not equally valuable. On the other, we we value people beyond their work.
Abstract discussion of this is always disappointing and policy based on abstract discussion is always disastrous. I really wish we could be more precise in our language, because then we would at least recognize the tremendous difficulty at hand.
Maybe an easier incentive would be to give tax breaks to cooperatives?
There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that, while a similar employee doing the same work who just happens to work at a failing company should get nothing. How could you justify that?
Putting business profit taxes in a big pot and spending them on everyone evens this out.
Fundamentally all you're really saying is you want corporate taxes to be higher. Which is arguable given the well-understood negative consequences of that which hurt everyone (e.g. taxes dissuade business formation, which means no jobs at all).
That sounds like every startup job pitch.
It never really pays off later for game programmers.
A $2M exit sounds great until you factor in the extra taxes and 5 to 10 years to realize that. Many software developers could make a substantial amount of that, without the risk, simply by aggressively working career changes.