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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

In the early days of Electronic Arts (I wasn't there, but knew lots of people who were), Trip Hawkins used to say to his employees who wanted credit, "If you want that, give up your regular salary & stock options, take the risks, and go out on your own. If your game is any good, we'll produce it and you'll have the royalties."

So he had a Hollywood-ish model: the big studio backs an independent who makes the movie -- it doesn't make the movie with its in-house talent, like in the 30's and 40's.

I have no idea how it works now, by the way.

==== epilog ====

We (Analytica) had a softball game against EA. They killed us and Trip hit a towering home run.

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Hollywood has credits, even for the accounting departments that are definitely getting salaries and not royalties.

difference between "credit" and "royalties."

Thanks for sharing, fun anecdote.

Works both ways. There are publishing functions and development functions.

A "studio" does development. It can be independent or owned by a bigger company.

A "publisher" focuses on handling distribution / sales & marketing functions. It can publish games from studios it owns ("first party") or from external studios it has business contracts with ("third party").

There are companies that do various mixes of these functions, but the biggest tend to do them all.

Yes, that's a good overview.

In addition, I think in the last few years the swing has been towards bigger publishers or corporate holding groups (Embracer, Microsoft/Sony, Tencent, etc) sweeping up lots of previously independant studios (Eidos, Riot, Double Fine, Mojang, etc) in acquisitions - for the sake of owning the intellectual property and freedom to do more with the license. But also, and crucially, stopping other rival companies doing the same thing first, leading to big arguments like this one: https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/3/23623363/microsoft-sony-ft...

Perhaps the colder global financial situation will cool this acquisition/centralisation spree, but maybe not!

There's huge advantages to combining together for studios and publishers because then they can demand better terms from Valve/Epic/Sony/Microsoft/Apple/Google, if they are not already working for one of the above.

That's kind of orthogonal to how Hawkins started EA. He launched with this ad putting his game designers up front and naming them outright:

https://www.eurogamer.net/seeing-farther-the-advert-that-cha...

I knew four or five people who were with him at the beginning. How about you?

Note that he doesn't say he'll hire game designers as employees & give them royalties.

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