[RupertWiser]

I’m not sure it’s fair if the product ends up making a boat loads of money. Games are high risk but a very lucrative industry.

Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

[jkingsbery]

(I'm assuming by football you mean American football)

It's not really a fair comparison. The NFL is a monopoly, so there is no way for athletes to vote with their feet. At various times in the past, in order to negotiate the NFLPA has had to decertify in order to sue the league.

The NFL is also not a good proxy, because the average career for an NFL player is 2-3 years, and it is a physically dangerous job.

[Quarrelsome]

The analogy works with European soccer as well though, which isn't as much of a monopoly (given that the European model isn't franchise based).

[readams]

Worth noting that Football is a legal cartel, explicitly excluded from antitrust law. You can't really extrapolate much from it as an example.

[pmyteh]

It's true of association football (soccer) as well, and that's much less cartel-ised. The players have successfully extracted such a high proportion of the surplus that the returns for the club owners as a group are negative.

[robertlagrant]

> Just look at how successful football players were in getting a slice of the pie. I’d still consider that a dream job.

In this case they are the product, and there are a lot of customers. Plenty of people working on the things that make those players valuable, building and staffing stadiums, and filming and broadcasting events worldwide, that don't get a share. Because they aren't the product.

[factsarelolz]

> that don't get a share

They wouldn't have those jobs if the players or the league did not exist. That's their share. They make a lively hood off the product's operations.

[Quarrelsome]

sure but the product is puppets and the devs are arguably the puppeteers.

[nemo44x]

Football players aren’t replaceable. At least not at the level people are willing to pay too dollar to watch.

[aapl88889]

Yes they are. College football gets big ratings every year with replaced players.

[Manuel_D]

Lucrative for a select portion of games. Like music or acting, video game is a winner-take-all marketplace (or rather, winner take most). The typical video game developer outside a well-known studio is working long hours for comparatively little pay because it's very likely the game is not going to make very many sales and there's plenty of passionate people willing to make sacrifices to work on video games.

As other commenters pointed out, it's not like playing in the NFL. It's more like being a high school football player trying to get into the NFL. Or an actor trying to get a part in a Hollywood movie. The chances of a company becoming lucrative off games is slim.

[Ekaros]

Aren't the well-known studios also pretty big and the products they make absolutely humongous in simply the man hours? So even then there isn't that much to pay per employee.

There is some outliers, but simply most games either are not popular or even if they are they also take huge amount of labour to develop.

[cool_dude85]

Not that successful, assuming you're talking about American football. The players as a whole get a bit less than half of all revenue coming in despite being the ones to actually, you know, play the game.

[nend]

That sounds a lot more successful than most other industries. I don't think software engineers, or retail employees are getting half of the business' revenue. That sounds like a pro union example.

[nordsieck]

From what I can tell, that's fundamentally because of the limited number of franchises.

The situation is a bit like cabs in NY city before Uber/Lyft - the medallion owners were the ones who were making the real money.

[giantg2]

Well, they (and the others) should be getting even less. States or cities subsidizing stadiums isn't as beneficial as originally thought. Those making obscene amounts of money from a public resource should probably contribute more to the infrastructure required to make that money.

[lukas099]

Being an NFL football player means you are in like the top 0.0001% of players in a very popular sport, so it's natural that you'd have some leverage.

[mmcdermott]

With the added ingredient that fans follow players for a mixture of ability and personal brand. In that sense, it shares some similarities to acting. Names act as box office draws in ways that aren't purely about acting talent.

[charcircuit]

If a product makes a boatload of money how is it fair to the business to force them to pay more. What if the game instead went over budget and flopped? Should the workers now owe money to the company? Businesses that can figure out how to make the most money with the resources available to them deserve to make that money and it's unfair to take that money from them.