If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Now I don't think it's right to dismiss the work done by all the supporting staff who didn't work on the actual game but whose work was nevertheless vital for the game and business to succeed. But your comment isn't right either.
> I was one of the five people who had helped create this strangest of games. (Markus, and later Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, coded the original launch version; Daniel Rosenfeld, known as C418, wrote the music; the Swiss artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand did the in-game paintings ; I wrote the narrative ending. That’s it. That’s the team.)
You may not value his input compared to the coding, music and artwork, but he's part of a small select group that actually produced the original content.
The later team also contributed to later releases of the game I'm sure, as well as customer service, working in the canteen etc., but he's not making an unreasonable point about his contribution.
How would he know? From his own account, he was nothing more than a contract supplier who supplied one single thing.
He claims that they were friends, but his own account of the whole mess shows that that isn't true.
That said, I'm kinda curious about what roles the other ~25 staff had in such a small team. HR and legal and such I guess?
The fact that his work is still referenced, is still part of the game, and wanted by people on t-shirts/mugs/etc is significantly more contribution than the moronic made-up "0.000000000001%" number you claim.
He is a flawed person and he admits it several times in his post. But he also uses his story to highlight some good points about how broken the tech-capitalist system can be for artists, and that is my takeaway from this post. So please have a little empathy, it is not easy to know if you are being treated fairly in this complicated world today.
Oh please, enough hyperbole, we got already that in his post.
I read his entire post before I posted my reply, and his entire post is whining about how much the employees who ultimately contributed to building, selling, marketing, administration and supporting the game got paid compared to his contribution which, in all honesty, added virtually nothing to the game.
> The fact that his work is still referenced, is still part of the game, and wanted by people on t-shirts/mugs/etc is significantly more contribution than the moronic made-up "0.000000000001%" number you claim.
His contribution being referenced has nothing to do with the quality of the contribution. IOW, people are referencing the content because it's part of the game; had his contribution been swapped out with any other content, they'd still be referencing it.
As far as you calling me a moron goes, objectively, his contribution to the success of the game, measured by almost any metric you'd care to use, is statistical noise. If it were not there no one would care. If it were removed no one would care.
> So please have a little empathy, it is not easy to know if you are being treated fairly in this complicated world today.
I have empathy for those who area treated unfairly. This poster was overpaid for what he produced. There's a line of people who would have done a better job for half the money while still making a decent living.
He hit a jackpot, and is too self-involved to realise this, even now. His lack of self-awareness is so high that, while reading his whine, I half thought it was satire or parody of some sort.