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Comment by RupertWiser | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure it’s fair if the product ends up making a boat loads of money. Games are high risk but a very lucrative industry.

Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

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(I'm assuming by football you mean American football)

It's not really a fair comparison. The NFL is a monopoly, so there is no way for athletes to vote with their feet. At various times in the past, in order to negotiate the NFLPA has had to decertify in order to sue the league.

The NFL is also not a good proxy, because the average career for an NFL player is 2-3 years, and it is a physically dangerous job.

The analogy works with European soccer as well though, which isn't as much of a monopoly (given that the European model isn't franchise based).

Soccer does have a pretty big difference though: it isn't particularly dangerous and there are players that participate for a decade and more. That's also why it's not as centralized... Players aren't quiet as endangered when entering, so they're likely more willing to participate in games with smaller payouts.

I would argue that we're overvaluing the level of danger here. All athletes risk their entire career being cut short due to injury. What the European footballing system does (by not being franchised) is allow there to be multiple levels below the "top" level which then justifies the number of children trained in the game so there are careers (of varying degrees of profitability) for many of them.

However what we are discussing is rather the levels of money at the top of such an industry and that concept applies to both sports. Where Ronaldo can earn £25m in a year at Manchester United while still having his "dream job". Football in Europe since the Bosman ruling has allowed its players to share in the wealth of the industry; one could argue that programmers in the gaming industry are not afforded that same. It remains an interesting discussion as to exactly why that is and I think the risks that workers take are not as relevant to the amount of money available in the game and scarcity of the best employees available; which results in such inflationary salaries for the very best employees.

Worth noting that Football is a legal cartel, explicitly excluded from antitrust law. You can't really extrapolate much from it as an example.

It's true of association football (soccer) as well, and that's much less cartel-ised. The players have successfully extracted such a high proportion of the surplus that the returns for the club owners as a group are negative.

> Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

In this case they are the product, and there are a lot of customers. Plenty of people working on the things that make those players valuable, building and staffing stadiums, and filming and broadcasting events worldwide, that don't get a share. Because they aren't the product.

> that don't get a share

They wouldn't have those jobs if the players or the league did not exist. That's their share. They make a lively hood off the product's operations.

I agree. Check the comment I'm replying to for more.

Could you link? I reviewed you comment history and don't know which specific reply you're talking about in this thread. Thanks!

sure but the product is puppets and the devs are arguably the puppeteers.

What do you mean?

Football players aren’t replaceable. At least not at the level people are willing to pay too dollar to watch.

Yes they are. College football gets big ratings every year with replaced players.

> College football gets big ratings every year with replaced players.

We're talking about professionals. If the Chiefs could replace Patrick Mahomes and save themselves $450,000,000 without impacting their business, they would.

The same people that think they're an irreplaceable 10x engineer think athletes are replaceable cogs... imagine that.

And how many Patrick Mahomes is there in Chiefs? Dozen? Dunno amount of players per team in not-football.

Lucrative for a select portion of games. Like music or acting, video game is a winner-take-all marketplace (or rather, winner take most). The typical video game developer outside a well-known studio is working long hours for comparatively little pay because it's very likely the game is not going to make very many sales and there's plenty of passionate people willing to make sacrifices to work on video games.

As other commenters pointed out, it's not like playing in the NFL. It's more like being a high school football player trying to get into the NFL. Or an actor trying to get a part in a Hollywood movie. The chances of a company becoming lucrative off games is slim.

Aren't the well-known studios also pretty big and the products they make absolutely humongous in simply the man hours? So even then there isn't that much to pay per employee.

There is some outliers, but simply most games either are not popular or even if they are they also take huge amount of labour to develop.

Not that successful, assuming you're talking about American football. The players as a whole get a bit less than half of all revenue coming in despite being the ones to actually, you know, play the game.

That sounds a lot more successful than most other industries. I don't think software engineers, or retail employees are getting half of the business' revenue. That sounds like a pro union example.

From what I can tell, that's fundamentally because of the limited number of franchises.

The situation is a bit like cabs in NY city before Uber/Lyft - the medallion owners were the ones who were making the real money.

Well, they (and the others) should be getting even less. States or cities subsidizing stadiums isn't as beneficial as originally thought. Those making obscene amounts of money from a public resource should probably contribute more to the infrastructure required to make that money.

Being an NFL football player means you are in like the top 0.0001% of players in a very popular sport, so it's natural that you'd have some leverage.

With the added ingredient that fans follow players for a mixture of ability and personal brand. In that sense, it shares some similarities to acting. Names act as box office draws in ways that aren't purely about acting talent.

If a product makes a boatload of money how is it fair to the business to force them to pay more. What if the game instead went over budget and flopped? Should the workers now owe money to the company? Businesses that can figure out how to make the most money with the resources available to them deserve to make that money and it's unfair to take that money from them.

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