I had asked a question very similar to this, about what to do for teams that have already released something, but haven't discussed finances.

What I'm hoping for here, is a discussion on how to talk about splitting the money.

For instance, did you just make up ad hoc numbers based on a persons general skill at the beginning?

- Did your team have hour reporting, did you partially break it down based on that?

- Did you look at any list of pay grades based on skill sets/experience, and what were those links?

- Did you just agree to split the money 50/50, 33/33/33, 25/25/25/25, etc...

Did you have any akward moments from arguing over the amounts, haggling, how did that go.

Did you have any regrets about how something was handled, or wish you had planned it differently?

I'm planning on discussing this with some of my students. (typically Minors/US (not all)) I wanted to make sure I have more perspective/opinion than my own.

For best results make it discretionary to the person who is managing the project.

Let's imagine you codify that you want a 5-way split, then one person stops contributing halfway into the project. You would still need to pay his full share.

Let's imagine you codify that you want a 5-way split, and you have two artists. One artist ends up contributing only a few concepts and minor work through the entire project, the other contributes significantly and contributes heavily through the entire project. They would still end up with an equal share.

Let's imagine you codify that you want a proportional split based on contributions, as measured by checkins. Imagine one person contributes a great deal of trash that must be reverted, another contributes a bunch of gems, and they have equal number of checkins.

Finally, lets imagine the money was bound by contract, and four years after everyone has split up the product has an additional sale. You are now contractually bound to hunt down each of the individuals and pay them their portion of the funds, if feasible.

Making payment discretionary solves many diverse problems.

Your team should be in a position to trust the team leader to distribute any profits fairly, just as they trust the leader to make the other business plans for marketing and selling and otherwise managing the project. Similarly, the team leader should be trustworthy (which sometimes is not the case).

Your team should be in a position to trust the team leader to distribute any profits fairly, just as they trust the leader to make the other business plans for marketing and selling and otherwise managing the project. Similarly, the team leader should be trustworthy (which sometimes is not the case).

I think that is a very clear/good point on this. The team should agree trust a member, most likely the team lead, to make financial decisions as need be, including distributing the pay, particularly as it comes to the amount of work done.

It might be useful (as a teaching device), to track a couple different methods--perhaps even making up fictional artists/composers, etc, regardless of which method you actually end up using

For example, you might consider

Scenario 1)

Someone "fronts the money" to pay for development and pays flat-fee, Work for Hire people to create the art, sound, coding. No splitting of profits. "leader" takes all profits (since he's 'paid' the people under a work for hire scenario.)

Scenario 2)

even n-way split. No one 'fronts the money'-- everyone just puts in sweat equity

Scenario 3)

Leader-based payout as described in your 1:34pm post.

Scenario 4)

whatever other method of splitting your students come up with

Then you could see how much the various people make, based on the actual outcome (i.e. what your game made in reality) as well as a few fictional scenarios (game totally flops and 8 people buy it; game sells decently (say 10k units); game becomes megahit ala angry birds.

Just my $0.02... :)