Sure, Minecraft would have still sold as much if the ending screen said "You won" or much simply "The end".
But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.
I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.
He certainly seems to struggle with talking about money. Like he said: he should have let his agent handle it. But he didn't, because he saw this as something other than what it was: a friendship instead of contract work.
It was an awkward relationship because both sides had a completely different view of what the relationship was, and didn't really communicate that with each other. It's great that he was finally able to write this down. It sucks that he struggled, and Mojang could easily have just given him $1 million to sign the contact, but his inability to talk about this, to talk about money, is probably the main reason for this as well as possibly many of his other financial troubles.
Sure, it's possible that's true, but I don't see how that reflects poorly on anyone but himself. He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
We can write justifications for why he did this, but that he seems to believe he was entitled to more money than the offer he accepted is entirely a problem of his own creation.
Expecting Mojang to deal with his communication and mental health issues is absurd.
Ultimately this is simply where ape brains and business economics collide. It reminds me of the experiment with two monkeys where one gets a cucumber and the other a grape.
As he said in his writing he simply assumed that whoever he is dealing with would give him what is fair. So he accepted the $20K and he was probably perfectly happy with his cucumber. Then later after a bunch of extra money is funneled into the company he sees a bunch of other people getting grapes for what he perceives as a similar effort to his own. Now the deal stops being fair in our monkey brains and we are hard-wired to demand equivalent payment.
However business economics has an entirely different concept of what is fair. It assumes everything is fair as long as promises are kept and deals are honored. There is no concept in business of renegotiating compensation of old contracts if someone else gets more compensation for a similar effort. This is why collective bargaining by unions is the only way for everyone to get equal pay for equal work.
Why would it reflect poorly on anyone but himself? Well, I guess he has appearances going for him: he's a struggling artist while the other party is a wealthy corporation. But him being a struggling artist seems to be a clear choice, even if he hasn't quite made that choice explicit for himself.
> He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
The way I'm reading it is that he didn't even want to talk about the money. It had to be all about the art. And yet he clearly has lots of feelings about the money. Like I said, it's mostly his own attitude that's his problem. And although he claims lots of personal growth because of this, I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others.
Still, he's probably right that he still owns it and Mojang only had a license, and giving it to the public domain is a nice gesture, if made with some grandstanding.
Well, we're all here under a comment on HN asking why the article is getting such negative reactions. And when you describe the author's position as "I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others", maybe you can understand why the author is getting such negative reactions.
But he did want more, that's the whole point of the first half of this article.
> I admired the fact that he was, again, giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game
> I couldn’t understand why I was again being treated worse than them. I had helped him create the actual game, I had given him the ending he wanted but could not write
He acts as if he's some creative designer that played a huge role in the creation of the game. To be frank, an intern at Mojang that was with the company for a few months and added 2 blocks to the game would have made a bigger contribution than he made.
This is, in my opinion, the core disconnect the author has with reality, and is driven by the fact that to him his work is the center of the universe and he struggles to understand why that isn't the case for everyone else.
The author genuinely believes they made contributions to the game on the same level as Jeb, and that's why it feels unfair when he sees Mojang employees getting a $300k bonus and him getting nothing. But the reality is he made a very minor contribution to the game and got paid $20k, which is a pretty nice sum for a few days of work.
You see, I might be a little biased here, but as we don't have the email in front of us I'm going to have to take a guess.
I'm fairly confident that was was meant by that was exposure in the form of his poem getting put into Minecraft, not exposure in the form of a shout-out or other promotion.
Unless the author releases the email we'll never know the context, but I've been a spectator to these types of negotiations enough that I strongly believe the context would support my interpretation.
He was paid to write a poem to end the game. He was not paid for all rights to that work, forever. Its reasonable to assert that if Mojang wanted contractual rights for the work, they should have provided a signed contract which explained the rights they were purchasing.
>as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game
I think members of the modding community contributed much more in material terms, and both they and YouTube content creators contributed much more in driving it's rise & popularity, than the author of this poem. It seems the author had a pretty clear verbal contract on their compensation, and received the money.
They author didn't receive the promotional support for their other work that was promised, and I think should be their much bigger gripe. For an artist/creator I would think that would be the big pain point, not having their other work broadly exposed to an audience of millions, instead of the $$$ aspect they spend so much time on in this article. (Especially when that exposure would possibly have lead to significant financial success for their work as well)
But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.
I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.