[microsoftdoes]

You went on a rant impugning the characters of the other people involved and making yourself the victim. All that really happened is you got a good deal for a bit of writing, $20k. You wish you had asked for more. Everyone here called your bullshit. Now you wish people just saw your attack on the other people as art or an emotional journey or whatever other nonsense. If you want to make art, then make art. But if you write an attack on other people’s actions, then expect people to be critical.

[whatatita]

I'd hardly call that an attack. It's emotional and raw, and definitely not vindictive. I really enjoyed the honest writing. All too often people hide their feelings so they don't get misunderstood or misrepresented.

[birken]

I think it's very interesting so many people in this comment thread are so quick to point out that 20k is a fair, or even good, price for writing the end poem, but don't engage with the fact that $1800000k might be an excessive amount for one person to earn for making a video game.

The multiples and orders of magnitude of difference in the payouts are what make the decisions that the various people make interesting and complicated. The author did what he needed to do to make you feel those orders of magnitude in difference.

Also it is very funny to think that somebody who has 1.8 billion dollars is not greedy. I don't think that is impugning their character to point out something obvious.

[microsoftdoes]

The exchange value of something is what people are willing to pay for it.

[birken]

Well first of all it seems like (a) the author of the poem didn't explicitly agree to sell it at the price and (b) people are often willing to pay unfair prices for things in times of duress (IE... how much would you pay for a bottle of water if you were dying of thirst?).

And either way, the author isn't making a legal or moral argument one way or the other. He's just telling a story about his emotional response to this complicated and unique situation. The fact that the people on the other side of the story effectively have infinite wealth and still made the decisions they did is important to the story! It makes it easier for us to understand their motivations. He's a writer who wrote a story, it's not a wikipedia entry.

[microsoftdoes]

Yes he did. Do you people read the article before arguing about what’s in it? “and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was.”

Just because it’s his story doesn’t mean he can’t be immature and wrong in it.