[jghn]

I interpreted this as the product had a high risk/high reward profile.

Presumably for the developer the reward for the high reward path is continued employment, and the penalty for the high risk path is loss of job

[corysama]

This is indeed what I meant. I wasn’t clear. Entertainment products in general have a strong Power Law Curve to their relative revenues. Games are expensive to produce and have a high variance on their returns.

So, the rewards for a profitable game for most game employees is that the studio doesn’t shut down! Though I have heard of rare cases where people on a team hit a truly large royalty check from a game they worked on. Usually, the profit from a successful game goes into the war chest to cover the next failure.