Would you share how much a writer of your stature would get for writing the complete script of an RPG the size of vtmb? Simple curiosity.
"Of my stature"!
The tl;dr is that I have no idea. My pay has been all over the place over the years. On a couple projects, my pay rate has been 20 cents or 25 cents a word. That included Infinity, where I wrote the 25k-word script in three days, by far my best labor:pay ratio ever. In a few instances, I was paid a salary -- that salary was ~$6700/month at TimeGate and $5000/month at S2 Games for general writing work (some PR stuff, some design stuff, some text). Before that at S2 Games, I was paid a flat milestone rate, which was not a very good arrangement for me -- I
think it was ~$12k for the Kohan II; for Axis & Allies it was ~$10k. I think the limited work I did on Bioware was about $3500 on a milestone basis. For TTON, I was paid $20/hour, which is the lowest pay rate I've had since painting houses in high school. Nikitova paid me something like $1750 to write a plot outline for an F-Zero style racing game. On Primordia, I got a third of our cut of the game's profits -- basically Steam/GOG take 30%, then WEG takes 30%, then we split the rest up evenly. That has been by far my most profitable project, but also the one I spent the most time on.
My general approach has been to simply tell employers to figure out what they think would be fair, and then knock off an additional 20% so that they feel like they're getting a steal. Then, over time I negotiate upward if they're happy with my work. The only person who ever really took advantage of the offer was Kevin Saunders, and I bless him for his boldness in the face of my bluff. (Normally, people feel guilty and wind up paying pretty well in response to that pitch.) To be honest, making money at this has been fun, but it's not really why I do it. On early projects, the pay helped open doors to me (the industry looks very differently at paid and unpaid work) and helped defray my tuition expenses. At S2 Games, the money was the main reason for doing it, especially after they withdrew from a verbal agreement to co-develop Star Captain (a reasonable move, I suppose, but I still think the wrong one). I had offered to walk away from nine months' salary in exchange for them co-developing it, but to no avail. The idea was then that I'd plow the money they paid me into other projects, and that's more or less what I've done -- I put a fair amount into Fallen Gods and Cloudscape, but I also gave a fair amount of it away on Kickstarter to projects that seemed to be doing the things I wished I could. (I think I
backed ~300 such projects, though usually at relatively small amounts.) With TTON, the money was totally irrelevant to my motivations. I would've done it for free, though it would probably have left me grumpier on nights when I stayed up late wrangling with OEI.
If I had the opportunity to write the story to a V:TM:B style game, I'd probably do it on the cheap, but I think if you were paying real industry rates it would wind up, I dunno, maybe in the ~$200k range spread across three writers? I'm actually not sure how many words the game had.
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