20000€ would in most European countries be a pretty good compensation for about 3 months of work, after taxes. It doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of it.
> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.
In this framing, these are examples of being treated as an outsider.
> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.
(Since the author seems to have spent about a month or so working on the game, you could reason that his compensation is about on par with the employees who worked for a full year. But he doesn't seem to see it that way, or he thinks he should be compensated better than them? I don't know.)
I'm speculating, but having known "artists", some of them think very differently to the average HN crowd.
He outright says it in the article, about how it wasn't about the money. If it was, there are more effective ways of going about getting that compensation than putting the story into the public domain
However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits.
They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him again except for legal reasons.
Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.
the point is the gift economy