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The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

by EdwardDiego22 minutes ago|

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The massive battle Peter Jackson had with the studio after none of the LoTR movies made a "profit" was very telling.

Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol

by jrflowers58 minutes ago|

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My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.

by sroussey4 minutes ago|

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That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.

The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.

Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.

by kenhwang53 minutes ago|

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Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).

It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.

by idle_zealot1 hours ago|

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It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.

by jfengel1 hours ago|

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Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.

by Ukv36 minutes ago|

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If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.

by collingreen20 minutes ago|

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I don't think most game owners could take the server side software and assemble it into working servers their game could contact and use. This isn't realistic and needs something to change at the fundamental server design side and the game development side. A silly answer is regulations about how you can and can't make a game. Another silly answer is a cottage industry doing game server hosting that's required to be third party by law. I don't have any good, realistic ideas that aren't just trying to force game developers to build games differently (or build different games). Maybe that's the cost here but is that better than just letting angry customers influence the market?

by lovehashbrowns1 minutes ago|

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And yet kids take Java server components and mod components and assemble them into Minecraft servers for their friends, and there’s a whole industry around providing pre-configured servers for games like Minecraft, project zomboid, rust, etc. and those services have been around for decades. So I don’t know what the issue is.

by 0x4571 hours ago|

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Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.