Percentage of Royalties to share Thread

Hey,

For those of you with experience of a fully published title I'm curious as to what amount of royalty percentage to offer to share, obviously its subject to the amount of work being done by team member in question. But I'd love to know ifs there's a guide line as to what people in different disciplines would be expecting to receive as right now I'd be unsure of what to offer

It all depends on what you value the most, and what you cant do. If you can draw but you cant code, your going to be offering more to coders and less other artists, and vice versa. Not only to get them interested but to also retain them.

For indie games the money should be just the cherry on the top of the sundae, were its the love of making things that drives them. Sure there are people who want to make studios that will grow and compete much more fearlessly then the average indie developers, but that is far between.

I see variations in the scheme but most of it boils down the 4 categories on where you should be hiring people and spending the money. 1) Coding 2) Graphics 3) Sounds and the most often forgotten piece 4) Marketing. Say you are a selfless individual who believes everyone should earn the same amount, so each group gets 25% of the total pie. It can be argued that you deserve a higher percentage right off the top, hiring people, reviewing work, managing your team, coming up with the idea and starting the project. BUT it is also argued that you should be working the hardest because this is your baby and your going to be the one who cares the most if this lives or dies.

You have your team with everyone working in their respected fields, you can divide up the slices of pie even smaller. 5 artists, each can earn 5%, 2 coders each can earn 12.5%, and so on. But that is in a perfect world were everyone contributes the same amount of work, time and effort. Maybe the guy who coded 3/4 of the game deserves 15% instead of 12.5%, maybe the artist who always submits work late that needs to be revised doesn't deserve that 5%. What if someone leaves halfway through the project, do you scrap their work or give them a smaller percentage? New people coming onto the project?

Smaller teams you'll earn more, larger teams less. You pick up a lot from managing or just working on these kind of projects. Keep an open mind and be flexible, people who work on these projects probably don't expect a ridiculous sum at the end. After all your working for a percentage of an unknown number. Months of work could only earn each team member 3 cents, or you could strike it rich with the next bird based toilet game and earn 3 million a piece. The only thing people truly know that they are going to earn in working on a project are experience making a game, and pieces they can use for their portfolio.

Thanks for the advice there, all extremely helpful! So I'll try and be fair based on what the team members do over the project's duration and work it out at the end

That or dividing it equally on all people who worked on the project.

In an ideal world that might work for me.. but given the amount of people who've come onboard and done maybe one thing then gone silent, if produced anything at all makes me very hesitant to promise an equal share when I doubt the work done would be anything close to equal compared to how many people are putting effort in without expectation of receiving major amounts