Royalties were fairly common in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. My own experience was from a game dev owned by Sierra/Vivendi and we not only received royalties f

Royalties were fairly common in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. My own experience was from a game dev owned by Sierra/Vivendi and we not only received royalties for our games, but were given bonuses for games (namely Diablo and Half Life) under the larger umbrella. But as someone else mentioned it's not a straight % based on sales - they only kicked in at a certain point. And most games never hit that threshold. These days royalties are pretty rare I think. But it's common to get stock and/or profit sharing in the form of annual bonuses based on how the company as a whole did. That's how EA works, for example.