There is a royalty calculator here
http://www.makegames.com/royaltycalc.htmlMakeGames.com is a great site Diana Gruber has written many really good books on video games creation and her husband is the creator of FastGraph (fastgraph.com) They have many published video games and offer alot of insight into the industry. The reason for the calculator is to show that the designers do not get rich from a published game. Here is a qoute from a developer posted on her site, note the company names he wrote games for!
Commentary From A Game Developer
I gotta tell any kid thinking of getting rich some brutal facts from my own experience in writing PC games as a sole author/programmer/designer several years ago for major publishers (I did 9 games under pen names for Sierra On-Line, Adventure International, Electronic Arts, Konami and Broderbund). At least 2 of these sold in excess of 100,000 copies. All (but one) were done on royalty agreements ranging from 5-15% of net.
But in every case I had a hell of a time getting an *honest* or *any* accounting of my earned royalties from the key accounts payable person(s) at these companies. Let alone getting my royalty checks from *its in the mail* to physically in my mail box. Beware. If you're contracting as an individual with these business machines, you will get *f---*! The most common form is to send the programmer an UNSIGNED contract, asking him/her to sign and return it ... only to discover that, as time passes and the market changes or something else, the programmer ends up being contractually committed, the clock starts running, but the company cant find the right person to sign and return you a complete two-way contract.
Writing a good game, though it is getting easier every year (thanks to Fastgraph), is still a major investment of time and sweat. Count the hours and you may discover you'd do better at the Burger King. I will *NEVER* do it again without getting a big chunk of cash up front, and some contractual performance clauses that corporate attorneys do not approve, or an absolute time-and-effort fee with a high hourly rate. That is unlikely because these businesses can always find some kid(s) who are motived by the imaginative challenge as fodder for their machines.
Jack Diamond
