This whole substack, but in particular: https://news.animenomics.com/p/nafca-anime-worker-survey-lon...
NHK video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5AR2X6R4TM
From what I can tell, the production does a lot of Hollywood-style accounting where the production companies take most of the profits and most of the actual work is contracted out.
In a way, the work itself turns into part of the compensation so people are willing to have a worse everything else as long as they do the thing.
However in this case with Gainax, the failure isn't due to anime production committee style accounting or anything like that. It's entirely because gainax hemorrhaged all their talent to offshoot studios and then gainax has done effectively nothing other than contract work out and milk IP in the ~15-20 years since then.
Some combination of skill, capital and ambition. Running a company is hard, and a specialised skill. Just look at restaurants to see how unevenly distributed administrative skills are.
If there are so many people willing to work for pennies _for the sake of working there_ that even a significant fraction of you organizing a stop-work won't make a dent other than a one-off blip if you arrange so much disruption it hiccups production visibly, there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere.
That they’re making peanuts is unsurprising. That someone else isn’t, is. My question is what value the executives provide. In gaming, it’s distribution expertise—a random band of artists probably can’t negotiate distribution on a major console.
Also let's be real - most 'animators' are just tracing masters into different scenes. There's a small subset of them that are highly skilled, especially on non-original shows that use source material. I'd support paying true character artists and scene artists well, but not copy-pasters which seems like busy-work.
It's too bad about that one, fun game for what it was.