> allow for being paid for life for a craft that has been made once
It costs on average 7$ to buy a craft that took maybe 2 years for a team of 10 developers (since we are speaking of DOS era games). Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person? Reasoning like this is why most gaming companies pivoted to either use Denuvo or to make pay-to-win, ad-filled products. I cannot blame them, seeing people that are wishing to spend hours on a game, but not to pay the rightholders the equivalent of 5-10 minutes of average SWE salary.
My opinion is that work should be compensated fairly, that's all. I was just highlighting that copyright is a strange exception, the patent system is more fair even if not perfect. 25 years to make money on an idea seems good enough to me.
That $7 isn't going to the developers.
IMO the employees should somehow be paid for making the game based on how well they did so, during development and on release, but not paid later except for updates.
Because it costs $0 to copy the game, all the resource cost is in production; and popularity is an OK motivation for good games but not the best, as evidenced by the prevalence and revenue dominance of microtransaction slop.
Let's not pretend any of the original developers from the early 2000s or even worse, from the 90s get any money from these old games you buy.
The site pirates games that are still being sold by their original devs, like “Ports of Call”. Even for some games published by bigger companies, some of the original developers get a small cut on lifetime sales. So I don't need to “pretend” anything.
That can happen yes but it's rare, usually they just got their salary and the rights were sold/re-sold/sold again to larger media conglomerates merge after merge.
> Are you suggesting such works should have been paid 7$ just once by one person?
No, I think people should just be paid a livable UBI and not have to worry about proving their worth to you to be allowed to live.