However, there is another side of this that I’ve been afraid to talk about in public. And that is this: our studio has not yet seen a single dollar from sales. That Dragon, Cancer was created by a studio of eight, and for many of us it was a full-time effort that involved thousands of hours of work. This huge effort required taking on investment, and we decided to pay off all of our debt as soon as possible. But we underestimated how many people would be satisfied with only watching the game instead of playing it themselves.
And so yes, Let's Play person, I agree with you, it does suck to have someone else making revenue off your work.
Found this quite interesting as someone who follows game development and regularly watches Let's Players.
It is interesting, but it's also disingenuous.
I hadn't heard of this game before you posted it. In the past 20 minutes, I've discovered:
- they had an exclusivity agreement that they reneged on
- they were covered $104k through Kickstarter. Sure, 8-person team or whatever but I've done movies with less
- they have a documentary coming out in April
- Their game is 2 hours long
- it's fifteen bucks on Steam
- They've made a quarter million dollars off of it there
- The most watched "let's play" they have only has 2.5 million views which, from what I know of Youtube, is about $1800 worth of revenue
That's the thing about remix culture - someone will appropriate your work and repurpose it. If your argument is that your work isn't really being repurposed, yet people are still enjoying the appropriation, it's possible that your original purpose wasn't well-served.
I watched some of that let's play. It's a shitty-looking game with minimal interaction. It looks like you've basically got camera control over a world that makes Second Life look like The Matrix. And it's entirely possible that the rational price-point for the game is well below the $15 they're charging. A fee that, by the way, they got 2300 times before they even released.
And I'll be honest - there's something kinda icky about parents throwing a documentary and a video game release at the memory of their dead kid while they have two others that are still living. We all grieve in our own ways and I got nuthin' against that but throwing the composer under the bus is bullshit. He either did a work for hire and got paid or he's profit-sharing in which case singling him out is cowardice. Either way, the amount of revenue being "lost" to Let's Plays is low enough that this whole thing is tacky.