Can you please not break the site guidelines like this? You may not feel you owe an author better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
So, the distinction being made is between people who work on the artistic product itself (music, programming, graphics, game design, and, yes, the text at the end) and the people who work on things like marketing, business management, customer support, developing the web page and payment solution, etc. And in this view, he is indeed part of the group of people who helped "create the actual game", unlike many of the other employees.
Now I don't think it's right to dismiss the work done by all the supporting staff who didn't work on the actual game but whose work was nevertheless vital for the game and business to succeed. But your comment isn't right either.
Most of that 47 came along after the game was created as discussed in this quote:
> I was one of the five people who had helped create this strangest of games. (Markus, and later Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, coded the original launch version; Daniel Rosenfeld, known as C418, wrote the music; the Swiss artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand did the in-game paintings ; I wrote the narrative ending. That’s it. That’s the team.)
You may not value his input compared to the coding, music and artwork, but he's part of a small select group that actually produced the original content.
The later team also contributed to later releases of the game I'm sure, as well as customer service, working in the canteen etc., but he's not making an unreasonable point about his contribution.
He mentions that there were only five people actually on the actual dev team _at launch_? Notch, C418 (music), Jeb (only coder at launch), Kristoffer Zetterstrand (ingame paintings), and him (ending). He said only 25 people were staff at the time as well. I am truly curious who they were and what their roles were.
I'm super curious on this too. I imagine at least a couple community managers and a PR person. So much of game dev is your community. Maybe a branding artist. Web dev for the website/java applet integration. It sounds like they were pretty well structured capital wise so definitely someone in payroll/accounting. But that's _still_ not 25.
I suppose someone had to be running servers, payment systems and so on as well. It is not exactly trivial to distribute and process as many copies as they sold.
It _does not_ seem like a stretch for him to know this. I've done work for a small agency and got to know most people there. The owner, head of art, billing, and other coders. I built 1 large website for them. We had enough communication where I came to understand how the org worked, and became more than acquaintances with the people I didn't know prior.
Wow, what an unpleasant hate-filled response to a single paragraph taken out of context from the entire post.
The fact that his work is still referenced, is still part of the game, and wanted by people on t-shirts/mugs/etc is significantly more contribution than the moronic made-up "0.000000000001%" number you claim.
He is a flawed person and he admits it several times in his post. But he also uses his story to highlight some good points about how broken the tech-capitalist system can be for artists, and that is my takeaway from this post. So please have a little empathy, it is not easy to know if you are being treated fairly in this complicated world today.
The fact that t-shirts and mugs are available on RedBubble does not prove that anyone wants to buy them. The business model of RedBubble means that merch can be created speculatively for no cost to anyone until it's actually bought.
> Wow, what an unpleasant hate-filled response to a single paragraph taken out of context from the entire post.
Oh please, enough hyperbole, we got already that in his post.
I read his entire post before I posted my reply, and his entire post is whining about how much the employees who ultimately contributed to building, selling, marketing, administration and supporting the game got paid compared to his contribution which, in all honesty, added virtually nothing to the game.
> The fact that his work is still referenced, is still part of the game, and wanted by people on t-shirts/mugs/etc is significantly more contribution than the moronic made-up "0.000000000001%" number you claim.
His contribution being referenced has nothing to do with the quality of the contribution. IOW, people are referencing the content because it's part of the game; had his contribution been swapped out with any other content, they'd still be referencing it.
As far as you calling me a moron goes, objectively, his contribution to the success of the game, measured by almost any metric you'd care to use, is statistical noise. If it were not there no one would care. If it were removed no one would care.
> So please have a little empathy, it is not easy to know if you are being treated fairly in this complicated world today.
I have empathy for those who area treated unfairly. This poster was overpaid for what he produced. There's a line of people who would have done a better job for half the money while still making a decent living.
He hit a jackpot, and is too self-involved to realise this, even now. His lack of self-awareness is so high that, while reading his whine, I half thought it was satire or parody of some sort.
