I don’t think any of the professional writers will be offended by me saying they’re at the indie/small press end of the market. I suspect none of them are in a position to start dictating terms to Harper-Collins quite yet. Still though, with a handful of exceptions, breaking into the major publishers is unlikely to make writers rich either. If someone is writing primarily to make money, they’d be best advised to look at either PR or advertising.
The fairest parallel to professional interactive fiction writers is RPG writers. If you accept that analogy, then CoG are offering very impressive contracts in comparison to many companies.
For the royalties contract, 25% is extremely good. For hardcover books, you’d generally be looking at 15%, max. Add to that the fact that copyright is only being given by license, not transfer (importantly, that means derivative rights remain with the author) and we’re in the realms of the outstanding.
The work for hire contract is similarly competitive. It averages out to 5c a word. That’s absolutely top-end for this kind of work. To draw a comparison with tabletop games again, if you’re an established writer, working on a core line book for one of the bigger companies, you’d probably be looking at 3c a word.
With both of those contracts, you need to take into account the “added value” being offered by CoG. They’ve developed a programming language. They provide a professional proofreader, which isn’t actually that cheap if you’re paying market rates (Far too many RPG companies don’t do this. It shows). They sort out cover art. They handle promotion. They do the apps for you. All of those things take time and work and sometimes money.
Actually, hosted games are also getting a pretty good deal as well. It’s still a 25% royalties rate and copyright is still given by license. In fact, the only difference between that and the professional royalties contract is the lack of an advance. While you don’t get all the services provided to professional writers, you still get the programming language and the apps. And any promotion done for the official games is going to have at least some knock-on effect.
All this is based on the public contract summary. There’s some stuff I’m ignoring because of not knowing the details (whether there’s a no compete clause, whether royalties are gross or net, etc.)
What this is all leading up to, is to point out that one of the main reasons CoG needs to charge for games is specifically so they can pay their writers well. It isn’t there so Jason can drive limousines into swimming pools and do Scrooge McDuck style dives into large piles of cash.
That isn’t to say people shouldn’t criticise games or that they should buy them solely on that basis. I do think a rating system would be useful (although that’s harder then it sounds. I care less about how many people enjoy a game and more about how many people with similar tastes to me enjoy it). But, personally, one reason I’m happy to give CoG my money is specifically because they’re an ethical company that treats its authors well.
To finish this potentially tl;dr post with an old industry joke, that may go some way to explaining why this stuff is all important.
What’s the difference between a large pizza and a game designer?
A large pizza can feed a family of four.