Schadrach , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative, and paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.

But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.

The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor. You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks. If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op (because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk), but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.