Hi, I was wondering for a game that has had it's design and artwork already created, what would be a realistic percentage to offer, based on a profit share scheme, for a programmer to carry out his / her work thereafter ? What sort of % would usually be the norm, or average ?
So you're getting the art, level designs, music, audio from elsewhere and all that remains is stitching these parts together in code? It all depends. How much have you already spent on these other assets? You'll need to factor that into the royalties. It also depends how big the game is and how much time it'll take him/her to program. But even once you've made all these calculations, at the end of the day, all it really comes down to is how much you can get them to believe in your game:— if they think it's incredible and a guaranteed success, they'll work on it at any percentage; if they feel it's a huge gamble, they will ask for 50%.
I agree with EssentialParadox with respect to the scale of the game. If it's a pretty simple game, you could get away with a fairly low %; if big and complicated it's going to scale up from there. Be sure you negotiate as net profits
This is definitely a sensitive issue, and is hard to define broadly without knowing a lot of details - like the scope of the programming job, the experience level of the programmer, etc. I did my first project (Face Race) in exactly the way you describe, and found a programmer who was excited about the project and was able to work on it in his spare time. This caused the development time to stretch out much longer than I had hoped, and in the end he couldn't even finish it because of some health issues and being overworked by his full-time job. Face Race is not as technically intense as many other games, so I managed to arrange a net 25% deal with him (which is now less because he couldn't finish, make SURE you work out milestones in the contract, and what % each milestone is worth.) Hope that helps!
That's a VERY good point, thanks for bringing it to the thread. But it's always mystified me how one can measure the 'milestone'; I mean, how can you know whether they've done 25% of the work or 95% of it? There's also the possibility the next programmer may need to start from scratch, at which point, does the original programmer get anything? If anyone has any experience on this, please post!
