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Comment by iepathos | Hacker News Reader

The person who really got screwed in all this is poor Charlie, the agent. Here he is managing deals for Julian getting a percentage of those deals and Julian it sounds like is not making much, so Charlie probably isn't making much off Julian either. Julian goes and basically gives away his most successful work to ruthless Mojang and Charlie gets nothing for it at all because Julian keeps Charlie in the dark. Charlie probably would've been able to get a significant sum from either Mojang or Microsoft for both of them, but instead gets cut out completely by Julian for no good reason.

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Seems like both the agent and the artist got scrod.

The epic-length post is like those movies that would've been 10 minutes if the people just talked with each other.

In this case, if the artist had just told the agent what they wanted, agent would've gotten to do their job, and artist would've avoided years of turmoil.

If the artist told them 20k wasn’t good enough he probably would have lost the job. This was he gets the job and the what if musing

Or the agent goes and says "He's an artist who loves your game -- like it's a triumph of human expression -- he can see the heart of it, and he done something pretty special that's worthy to be a capstone for the player's experience. You understand true art is about more than money. What do you think about these couple changes I've marked up, to show he's valued in a way that's meaningful to him? In addition to the shout-out, I thought a few shares would help him feel his contribution was appreciated as a valuable part, but let me know if that's a problem."

(I'm sure a real agent could negotiate much better than I could; I'm only suggesting that an agent could straighten this out and maybe get better terms, without threatening the deal.)

I mean, half the point of agents is to insert middle-men who won't get emotional about the deal while wringing as much value for their party out of it as possible.

If you're talking directly to someone about buying their house and you go, "your house is a piece of shit, everything is broken, knock $XX,000 off or I walk", they're going to tell you to go fuck yourself. Once you filter it through two agents they hear "well, the buyer is concerned about X, which is very reasonable, but Y is just being picky, we should come back to them with an offer for $ZZ0,000 and I think that's very fair." Sure, they're not happy about selling their house for less, and maybe no agreement can be reached, but the agents take a lot of the emotion and confrontation out of haggling so that you don't end up hating the other party before you can reach an agreement.

So it goes with all negotiations.

The emotional aspect of negotiating is a very interesting factor. You'd think it'd just come down to numbers, and that's probably where many logically-oriented folks get confused.

Well... he wrote a poem that gets displayed at the game end. He’s likely not getting shares for that. But I take your point.

>The epic-length post is like those movies that would've been 10 minutes if the people just talked with each other.

I was thinking this throughout a large portion of the article. Imagine how different things would have been if Julian and Carl stopped emailing each other "rapidly" and "frantically" and picked up the phone (or setup a Zoom meeting or whatever).

Sounds like there was no exclusivity agreement.

But the point is, assuming Charlie is a good agent, Julian would also have made more money (and with less effort) because Charlie would have put in the work to ensure Julian got a good deal.

The point I was replying to was that OP screwed over their agent, which is not fair.

Your point that OP would have been way better of if they did let their agent handle it from the beginning was made quite clear already:

> Looking back, I can see that I should, at this point, have handed the conversation over to my agent, Charlie, who negotiates my book deals with publishers, and who is a complete darling, and good at this sort of stuff. But I got stuck. I think I thought that bringing in my agent would potentially mess up this pure art relationship. Maybe he would be too ruthless, and it would all fall apart! Of course, now I can see that it would have had the opposite effect; Markus and I could have talked art, and Carl and Charlie could have talked money, and everyone would have been much happier.

Yeah, I incorrectly assumed you had misunderstood that, sorry. I read your “there was no exclusivity agreement” to mean “there was no reason for him to involve his agent”.

hahhahaha

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