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That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too.

That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so. This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.

wheels 4y ago
Indeed. This was a great deal for the writer. He wasn't part of the team. He was a contract writer. €20k is a lot of dosh for a few pages of text. It smacks of trivializing all of the work of the people who spent months working on it because he feels like he didn't get a big enough piece of the pie. It sounds like that got lost in the fog of war, because otherwise they'd just have said, "Ok, that's enough. We'll just hire someone else for half the price." I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
Moru 4y ago
Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.
- dcow 4y ago
  One can both be a small indie studio and also have sold multiple millions of copies of their game. Indie simply means you don't have a publisher. And Mojan didn't.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    Then Activision-Blizzard is indie. You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning. My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?) Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Indie is when the major investors are making the game, at least for me. So if the guys are making their own game without investments they are indie, as in the creators can be free of influences of outside investors.
    - andrewf 4y ago
      The Empire Strikes Back was the biggest-budget indie movie ever. Lucas didn't want to be beholden to the studios so he didn't take their money.
- blackoil 4y ago
  Size of Mojang is immaterial. If Apple or Microsoft hire a copywriter they'll still pay market rate. Any reason to believe the Author would have received bigger value with help of agent in 2010?
  - Moru 4y ago
    He would not have worried about it for so long, so yes I believe he would have help from his agent. I'm not talking about getting more dollars, he is buying peace of mind for his art.
  - Scarblac 4y ago
    His agent would have told him to at least deal with the contract before doing the work, I think.
Gigachad 4y ago
Yeah looking at the contract, it seems exactly like the kind of thing you’d want to have for content in a game. It removes all complexities as you may need to edit or do whatever to it years later. Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  > Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code. Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      > What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t? That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law. (I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.) For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them. Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use. > The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated. I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)
loup-vaillant 4y ago
> just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. It is, and that's the problem. From way down the post: BEGIN QUOTE Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40. END QUOTE
- Applejinx 4y ago
  He's got that wrong: the average musician loses money, gets nothing. Honestly, that's true at a lot of levels, not just the poverty level. It is said if you want to make a million dollars running a recording studio… spend three million dollars. If you want to be a million dollar rock star… invest (or have your family invest) ten million. It's like that. It's like, you can wear rags, or you can wear a suit, or you can wear a Superman cape. Would you like to for-real wear that Superman cape, to be the hero? Well, you can, for real. And it will cost you everything, more than you could imagine. I read this guy's essay in part because he WAS the Minecraft Story Guy, not because I thought he'd have good arguments. That's what he earned, and that's what it cost him (didn't sign up for his mailing list tho :) ) After he dies (assuming I don't go first) I'll remember things about his words. After Markus dies I won't remember a thing about his money (though I'll remember things about the game he made, he's not so different in that respect). I won't remember a thing about the Microsoft lawyers no matter whether they win or lose, whether they enjoin this guy from public-domaining what they see as their employer's property. So in a sense that thing didn't end up being their property and that's the writer's point. It all gets into philosophic realms, and that's where poets live, not lawyers.

wheels 4y ago

Indeed. This was a great deal for the writer. He wasn't part of the team. He was a contract writer. €20k is a lot of dosh for a few pages of text. It smacks of trivializing all of the work of the people who spent months working on it because he feels like he didn't get a big enough piece of the pie. It sounds like that got lost in the fog of war, because otherwise they'd just have said, "Ok, that's enough. We'll just hire someone else for half the price." I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.

Moru 4y ago

Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.

dcow 4y ago
One can both be a small indie studio and also have sold multiple millions of copies of their game. Indie simply means you don't have a publisher. And Mojan didn't.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Then Activision-Blizzard is indie. You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning. My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?) Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Indie is when the major investors are making the game, at least for me. So if the guys are making their own game without investments they are indie, as in the creators can be free of influences of outside investors.
  - andrewf 4y ago
    The Empire Strikes Back was the biggest-budget indie movie ever. Lucas didn't want to be beholden to the studios so he didn't take their money.
blackoil 4y ago
Size of Mojang is immaterial. If Apple or Microsoft hire a copywriter they'll still pay market rate. Any reason to believe the Author would have received bigger value with help of agent in 2010?
- Moru 4y ago
  He would not have worried about it for so long, so yes I believe he would have help from his agent. I'm not talking about getting more dollars, he is buying peace of mind for his art.
- Scarblac 4y ago
  His agent would have told him to at least deal with the contract before doing the work, I think.

Gigachad 4y ago

Yeah looking at the contract, it seems exactly like the kind of thing you’d want to have for content in a game. It removes all complexities as you may need to edit or do whatever to it years later. Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
> Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code. Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    > What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t? That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law. (I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.) For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them. Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use. > The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated. I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)

loup-vaillant 4y ago

> just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. It is, and that's the problem. From way down the post: BEGIN QUOTE Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40. END QUOTE

Applejinx 4y ago
He's got that wrong: the average musician loses money, gets nothing. Honestly, that's true at a lot of levels, not just the poverty level. It is said if you want to make a million dollars running a recording studio… spend three million dollars. If you want to be a million dollar rock star… invest (or have your family invest) ten million. It's like that. It's like, you can wear rags, or you can wear a suit, or you can wear a Superman cape. Would you like to for-real wear that Superman cape, to be the hero? Well, you can, for real. And it will cost you everything, more than you could imagine. I read this guy's essay in part because he WAS the Minecraft Story Guy, not because I thought he'd have good arguments. That's what he earned, and that's what it cost him (didn't sign up for his mailing list tho :) ) After he dies (assuming I don't go first) I'll remember things about his words. After Markus dies I won't remember a thing about his money (though I'll remember things about the game he made, he's not so different in that respect). I won't remember a thing about the Microsoft lawyers no matter whether they win or lose, whether they enjoin this guy from public-domaining what they see as their employer's property. So in a sense that thing didn't end up being their property and that's the writer's point. It all gets into philosophic realms, and that's where poets live, not lawyers.