"...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary."""
88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 percent.
Sure there were other people involved, but even if this art director's year of repetitive strain injuries is only worth one percent of the value of Bluey, then still it managed to capture only 0.3 percent of the value. This 99.7% makes the 30% Apple-tax on developers look good. I think it shouldn't.
The lesson for me is: creative endeavours are meant to die in our society.
namdnay · 7h ago
But if Bluey (like most shows people will work on) hadn’t been a huge success, he would still have kept his 88k
That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security
ksynwa · 5h ago
Would be cool if there was a middle ground between risking destitution by claiming a share of the income made and giving up your fair share of the billions made in return of a modest salary.
brookst · 1h ago
There is! You can negotiate a lower salary and higher participation. Obviously they have to want you, but when a show like this is starting up and not at all sure to even make it one season, an art director who would work for 25% pay and 1% of future profits would be snapped up.
phreack · 34m ago
Pessimistically, I'd then imagine they get burnt by Hollywood accounting and end up fully empty handed
Tade0 · 2h ago
There's the option of being a freelancer and establishing a co-op with your freelancer friends.
Easier said than done, but some people I knew from college actually managed to pull this off.
lotsofpulp · 4h ago
Such as buying shares of Disney stock?
Perhaps even via basically free 0.03% expense ratio index fund that automatically gives the owner access to business success across the entire economy.
Bluey is also made by the government, so technically, there is no equity gains or profit to be had at that level, it’s just a negotiation of compensation.
treyd · 2h ago
That's a great point. I'm glad to know that this is the only possible option and that the world can't be any better than it is.
z2 · 6h ago
Not at all familiar with animation or the broader industry but could they have at least offered the potential for royalties or some sort of sales based bonuses?
2muchcoffeeman · 6h ago
I believe most of the value of Bluey is captured by the BBC. The whole thing is a real shame for Australia. We’ve had a couple of the best children’s entertainment ever: Wiggles and Bluey. Don’t know why they didn’t negotiate a bigger piece of the pie with Bluey.
namdnay · 6h ago
For star voice actors or an animator who has already made their reputation on other shows maybe?
The interesting question would be “if at the time they had offered him 40k and points, would he have chosen that?”
suddenlybananas · 3h ago
It's not like she was offered equity and chose a meagre salary. Don't paint exploitation as a trade-off.
bobxmax · 2h ago
Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.
suddenlybananas · 2h ago
It's a technical term. She produced immense value and she didn't receive it, someone else took it. That's exploitation in Marxism.
I also don't get where you get these idea that there's this huge glut of artists producing work that's unpopular and getting paid for it. If you're at the point you're getting paid 90k a year, you're working in studios that almost certainly turn a profit.
AstroBen · 1h ago
The vast majority of startups lose money for their founders. So if that happens the founders should have been paid? The workers were the exploiters?
I've hired people first hand for projects that ended up being a flop. They made out much better than I did
Someone has to take the risk. It's not guaranteed it'll be a risk with a positive expected value either
dahart · 1h ago
The entire reason someone takes the risk is for the chance to have a ‘positive’ expected value, which in startup land means the company gets really big, hires a lot of people, and makes a lot of money for the owners (founders & investors) by selling a product for more money than they pay the workers.
Startup investors often treat this like an odds game, expecting that while 9 out of 10 investments might fail, one of them will return better than 10x, which turns into a net profit on investments.
The “risk” might be relatively big for small investors, but it’s quite low for the bigger savvier institutional investors.
Startups are economically interesting, but they are not the majority of the economy. When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
AstroBen · 1h ago
> Startup investors often treat this like an odds game
Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it
It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and they're still in the hole overall
> When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
Yeah these are definitely a different ballgame. Not sure where I stand on it - I don't know enough about the economics of that
dahart · 43m ago
I agree, and it’s objectively true, that there are no guarantees on investment. I don’t think GP was making any arguments that implied otherwise.
> It’s very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair
“Unfair” is subjective and an insanely deep topic we can’t even begin broach here thoughtfully. It’s always true that a profitable company has incomes that exceed its costs, by definition. Since costs include employee pay, it’s always true in a profitable company that employees are collectively providing a greater value to the company than they are capturing for themselves. You’re still arguing from a failed startup perspective, and by and large, failing and failed startups are not running the economy, nor are even a significant portion. The majority of people in the economy are working for someone else’s profitable company. People who have money do take risks on startups for the chance make it big, but those people had money to begin with.
suddenlybananas · 1h ago
You know that if an employee works at a start up that goes under, they also face risk right? Like you're aware that people get laid off and fired?
AstroBen · 1h ago
No I had no idea. Thanks
brookst · 1h ago
What studios consistently turn a profit?
They have years where they make hundreds of millions, years when they lose hundreds of millions.
It is weird to want the security of a paycheck, participation in unlikely huge successes, and no exposure to much more likely flops.
pastor_williams · 1h ago
How would her work operate under Marxism? Would she get to keep the immense value? That's not my understanding of Marxism but maybe I'm mistaken.
suddenlybananas · 1h ago
I'd recommend reading about what surplus labour is so that you could better understand the relevant arguments.
mrlatinos · 19m ago
Was this quote removed from the post? I'm not seeing it.
andrepd · 6h ago
A certain 19th century German thinker wrote abundantly on that issue :-) It's not just creative endeavours.
The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.
bobxmax · 2h ago
How does that remotely apply here? If she has the value, why didn't she distribute it herself?
MrBuddyCasino · 5h ago
[flagged]
danielvaughn · 4h ago
If you’ve seen the show, you’d know that this artists’ work was deeply instrumental to the creation of the wealth. It would be one thing if the author was an associate grabbing coffees and scheduling meetings.
In this case, not getting a royalty for their contribution is shameful.
polotics · 5h ago
Are you sure you read the parent post? It was not about wealth being immanent at all as I read it, it was about capital ownership granting full access to work-created value.
lotsofpulp · 4h ago
Doesn’t the British government and/or Australian government own Bluey?
What capital is there to own? Maybe Ludo Studios negotiated a piece of the pie for themselves, but I doubt it is much in the grand scheme of things.
> It was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation, with BBC Studios holding global distribution and merchandising rights.
dahart · 1h ago
The government part is a good point, this is not the best example of a capitalist endeavor.
> What capital is there to own?
The rights you mentioned is part of the ‘capital’ - these days capital and ‘means of production’ certainly involve intellectual property. I think it always did - capital was always referring to ownership - but the mix is starting to lean heavily on intangibles now, with software running so much of the world. The ABC & BBC capital used to include tons of high power broadcasting equipment, but maybe that mostly going or gone now?
lotsofpulp · 1h ago
I didn’t mean capital in the accounting sense, I meant receiving capital as remuneration as opposed to a salary. The more accurate word would have been equity, but I was using the term polotics used:
>it was about capital ownership granting full access to work-created value.
dahart · 37m ago
What do you mean? @plotics wasn’t talking about remuneration for products or services, nor equity. “Capital ownership” in the sentence you quoted is referring to the company, the ol’ ownership of the means of production. “Granting full access to work-created value” means the owners (investors, CEO, etc.) would split profits among workers rather than keep the profits for themselves.
tomhow · 2h ago
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
After the number of times I’ve seen people invoke the HN guidelines to trample good spirited discussions there should be a guideline against quoting the guidelines.
input_sh · 1h ago
If anyone's entitled to quote the guidelines, it's the mod you're replying to.
suddenlybananas · 3h ago
Or maybe the people who actually build that wealth deserve to keep it.
dahart · 1h ago
How do you think wealth works? Regardless of your political stance or economic beliefs, that doesn’t seem like a very informed or thoughtful summary of Marx, who I assume is who the parent comment was referring to, and was one of the more influential economists of all time. Have you read Marx? He might have thought and written about wealth more than both you and me. FWIW he didn’t argue that wealth somehow exists, he argued that for business owners, wealth stems from the discrepancy between what laborers are paid and what their employers collect. He went much further than that, but that much is technically true, right?
JohnScolaro · 8h ago
What a fantastic write-up. As a Brisbane native and software developer I often feel similarly to the author about Brisbane's software dev scene. Brisbane so often feels like a backwater, with the big dogs down in Melbourne and Sydney, and the 'peak of industry' in the US.
I'd love to move to Seattle and work for Amazon or something to get 'relevant industry experience' but what I'd really love to do is make a go of it here because - like the author - I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world ;-)
phinnaeus · 8h ago
I lived and worked as a dev in Seattle for 8 years before moving to Sydney. I want nothing more than for Australia to have a thriving tech scene but I haven’t seen much progress in that area since I moved here 5 years ago. I still love it and have no plans to go back. I just wish there was more opportunity here and not so much constant pressure to move back to the US for increased salary and challenge.
weeksie · 4h ago
Funny. I lived in Seattle for 5 years before I moved to Sydney, where I lived for 5 years. That was a different era though, tech wasn't the industry it is now and the internet still felt new. I moved down in 2003 and my American accent helped me land a job I wasn't qualified for (having self taught myself some php and java in Seattle, mostly working as a bartender though). In 2005 I started a small software shop with some friends. Back then (2003) the Ruby user's group was too small to get a reservation at a pub so we'd have to partner up with the Smalltalk guys. Rails came out a year or so later and that changed.
I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane.
Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.
2muchcoffeeman · 6h ago
Australia in some ways is the opposite of the US. Too much regulation and not enough effort to help people start businesses. It really needs to change and they’re missing a big opportunity to make the start up scene better. Just as long as we don’t do it while throwing out sensible regulations.
cadamsdotcom · 8h ago
Hey there, I’ve been in Sydney 5 years same as you (after a 7 year stint in SF) and feel exactly the same way.
If you’re around in the next week or two it’d be great to grab coffee and talk about it! Coffee being the great Aussie connector and all.
You can find my email on my profile.
chickenzzzzu · 8h ago
I live down the street from Amazon's relatively nice suburban office (you couldn't pay me to step foot in Seattle).
Let me save you the trip, you don't want to work for Amazon at the money they pay. They would have to 1.5x it or maybe even double it to make it worth the suffering of working there.
Life is short-- work somewhere else, or failing that, on your own thing :)
markus_zhang · 4h ago
I live in Canada and Bluey is the reason I really want to visit Brisbane.
mnbbrown · 7h ago
As someone who’s from Brisbane but spent the last 7 years in London you’re 100% correct. Brisbane is the best city in the world. I’m excited to eventually move back.
lukan · 6h ago
"I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world"
Personally the 3 times I visited Brisbane, were all in all quite neutral for me, not great, not bad. But friends had way worse experiences and when I found a iconic backpackers book, "No shitting on the toilet", I had a good laugh about those passages:
"A friend of mine would never leave a place until he’d had a good time there. Another friend would not leave a destination until he had learnt something encouraging about the people and their culture. Both are currently stuck in Brisbane."
So .. I would have been stuck there as well.
So please no offense about your home town.
I love Queensland. And Bluey. And would give your hometown a chance again.
But I do know people who never ever want to go there again. (But it also has been some years.)
JohnScolaro · 4h ago
Oh I can 100% see where all of that comes from too.
I think a lot of Brisbanes secret beauty is well hidden from people just visiting. The temperate rainforests, glasshouse mountains, some of the best beaches in the world all within an hours drive. The strange birds, the general attitude of the public. I think it's all quite nice. My only personal gripe is that I think it's far too hot in summer!
I'm also extremely biased though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Brisbane does have an awful lot of mediocrity too, but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!
lukan · 4h ago
"but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!"
Maybe see you there :)
dang · 13h ago
Recent and related (ok, maybe a bit much, but the new article looks good too!)
As someone who struggles to make anything that looks good, I am fascinated by designers ability to take a brief and bring it to life using their own unique artisic voice.
For me, at least, this shows the same emphasis on Story (talked about in part 4) - the animation is decent if not great, but the character does exactly what you expect him to at the end, and that's Story.
aaronbrethorst · 12h ago
I now avoid jobs that pressure everyone into thinking a good show or project can only be created at the expense of everyone’s well being. Even if the IP they’re offering you a chance to work on is exciting (and unfortunately I’ve seen way too many times now how this can be used as a bargaining chip to mistreat people). It doesn’t have to be that way. You can make something great without killing your crew.
hear hear.
jazzcomputer · 11h ago
I came across a game studio a few years ago here in NZ that does it right. I worked in a hot desk place that housed their studio in a space - they were never working past 5.30, had amazing staff reviews (they did them in a space where I could overhear them), have a good IP, good wage packages, excellent internal mentoring, a good gender split, recruit diverse staff.
I'm pretty sure there's a few other studios here too which are good. I'm just sharing this 'cos, well... it's nice to hear the positives.
unsnap_biceps · 11h ago
If you're willing to share their name, I'd love to take a look at their games and support a positive place.
jazzcomputer · 7h ago
Runaway Play
I also hear good things about Dinosaur Polo Club
ninkendo · 5h ago
Was this in the article somewhere? I searched and didn’t see it (and I’m most interested in why she left, and haven’t found anything on it.)
jwmerrill · 27m ago
The article is a four part series.
ekianjo · 10h ago
> You can make something great without killing your crew.
You could get many counter examples of projects that did very well and where everyone was in crunch mode for the last 6 months. There is no rule out there and one team being successful once doing things one way is not a proof of anything
diatone · 10h ago
Don’t think Catriona was commenting about whether or not it’s possible to make something great period. More that greatness doesn’t excuse not treating people like human beings
ggm · 11h ago
As a brisbane resident, seeing aspects of my city skyline lovingly created for kids TV is fantastic. I like to imagine small people the world over seeing the story bridge or "the zip water heater" state government building or the brown snake and to them it's just Shelbyville without a monorail but to anyone from Brisvegas..
jppope · 11h ago
Amazing story, and what a narrative voice! The whole thing pulls you in and pushes you off, it builds you up and breaks you down. I loved this
> * it was the beginnings of social media in the early 2010s*
- IRC + NNTP newsgroups were already popular by 1989.
- Myspace was quite popular by 2004.
- Facebook was popular by... 2006 I guess?
and that's just a few platforms I can mention.
aikinai · 9h ago
Your perspective of “popular” is incredibly far off. Popular among people in your circle of socioeconomics and interests is not that same as popular among the general population.
"...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary."""
88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 percent. Sure there were other people involved, but even if this art director's year of repetitive strain injuries is only worth one percent of the value of Bluey, then still it managed to capture only 0.3 percent of the value. This 99.7% makes the 30% Apple-tax on developers look good. I think it shouldn't.
The lesson for me is: creative endeavours are meant to die in our society.
That’s the inherent trade off in a salaried position - you are trading potential wealth for guaranteed security
Easier said than done, but some people I knew from college actually managed to pull this off.
Perhaps even via basically free 0.03% expense ratio index fund that automatically gives the owner access to business success across the entire economy.
Bluey is also made by the government, so technically, there is no equity gains or profit to be had at that level, it’s just a negotiation of compensation.
The interesting question would be “if at the time they had offered him 40k and points, would he have chosen that?”
I also don't get where you get these idea that there's this huge glut of artists producing work that's unpopular and getting paid for it. If you're at the point you're getting paid 90k a year, you're working in studios that almost certainly turn a profit.
I've hired people first hand for projects that ended up being a flop. They made out much better than I did
Someone has to take the risk. It's not guaranteed it'll be a risk with a positive expected value either
Startup investors often treat this like an odds game, expecting that while 9 out of 10 investments might fail, one of them will return better than 10x, which turns into a net profit on investments.
The “risk” might be relatively big for small investors, but it’s quite low for the bigger savvier institutional investors.
Startups are economically interesting, but they are not the majority of the economy. When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it
It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and they're still in the hole overall
> When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
Yeah these are definitely a different ballgame. Not sure where I stand on it - I don't know enough about the economics of that
> It’s very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair
“Unfair” is subjective and an insanely deep topic we can’t even begin broach here thoughtfully. It’s always true that a profitable company has incomes that exceed its costs, by definition. Since costs include employee pay, it’s always true in a profitable company that employees are collectively providing a greater value to the company than they are capturing for themselves. You’re still arguing from a failed startup perspective, and by and large, failing and failed startups are not running the economy, nor are even a significant portion. The majority of people in the economy are working for someone else’s profitable company. People who have money do take risks on startups for the chance make it big, but those people had money to begin with.
They have years where they make hundreds of millions, years when they lose hundreds of millions.
It is weird to want the security of a paycheck, participation in unlikely huge successes, and no exposure to much more likely flops.
The fact that access to capital is not evenly distributed means that those who don't have it have to surrender their surplus value to those that have it.
In this case, not getting a royalty for their contribution is shameful.
What capital is there to own? Maybe Ludo Studios negotiated a piece of the pie for themselves, but I doubt it is much in the grand scheme of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluey_(TV_series)
> It was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation, with BBC Studios holding global distribution and merchandising rights.
> What capital is there to own?
The rights you mentioned is part of the ‘capital’ - these days capital and ‘means of production’ certainly involve intellectual property. I think it always did - capital was always referring to ownership - but the mix is starting to lean heavily on intangibles now, with software running so much of the world. The ABC & BBC capital used to include tons of high power broadcasting equipment, but maybe that mostly going or gone now?
>it was about capital ownership granting full access to work-created value.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'd love to move to Seattle and work for Amazon or something to get 'relevant industry experience' but what I'd really love to do is make a go of it here because - like the author - I believe Brisbane is secretly still the best city in the world ;-)
I got back into web stuff when I moved to the states and have been up and down the stack many times since, but I have a ton of nostalgia for the stuff we did back then. Web 2 was an annoying new buzzword and we were still mostly writing software for kiosks, device drivers in C, bridging that with Lua, and using Flash for the interface b/c everybody else in the space was using shitty C++ Motif interfaces. . . . memory lane.
Imagine that Newtown and the Inner West are a lot different than when I lived there, but I do miss that time.
If you’re around in the next week or two it’d be great to grab coffee and talk about it! Coffee being the great Aussie connector and all.
You can find my email on my profile.
Let me save you the trip, you don't want to work for Amazon at the money they pay. They would have to 1.5x it or maybe even double it to make it worth the suffering of working there.
Life is short-- work somewhere else, or failing that, on your own thing :)
Personally the 3 times I visited Brisbane, were all in all quite neutral for me, not great, not bad. But friends had way worse experiences and when I found a iconic backpackers book, "No shitting on the toilet", I had a good laugh about those passages:
"A friend of mine would never leave a place until he’d had a good time there. Another friend would not leave a destination until he had learnt something encouraging about the people and their culture. Both are currently stuck in Brisbane."
So .. I would have been stuck there as well. So please no offense about your home town. I love Queensland. And Bluey. And would give your hometown a chance again. But I do know people who never ever want to go there again. (But it also has been some years.)
I think a lot of Brisbanes secret beauty is well hidden from people just visiting. The temperate rainforests, glasshouse mountains, some of the best beaches in the world all within an hours drive. The strange birds, the general attitude of the public. I think it's all quite nice. My only personal gripe is that I think it's far too hot in summer!
I'm also extremely biased though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Brisbane does have an awful lot of mediocrity too, but I'm still proud of it, and keen to show it off in 2032 with the Olympics!
Maybe see you there :)
‘Bluey’s World’: How a Cute Aussie Puppy Became a Juggernaut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43410874 - March 2025 (313 comments)
A look at the creative process behind Bluey and Cocomelon (2024) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43339206 - March 2025 (215 comments)
Also:
Bluey, and the hierarchy of distractions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510482 - Sept 2024 (14 comments)
How Australia’s ‘Bluey’ conquered children’s entertainment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38875399 - Jan 2024 (430 comments)
The second part to this is a fine example - https://goodsniff.substack.com/p/creating-bluey-tales-from-t...
I've always wondered how they managed to make the show look and feel Brisbane, and this delivers.
Pond Scum - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2VibU-NeEI
hear hear.
I'm pretty sure there's a few other studios here too which are good. I'm just sharing this 'cos, well... it's nice to hear the positives.
I also hear good things about Dinosaur Polo Club
You could get many counter examples of projects that did very well and where everyone was in crunch mode for the last 6 months. There is no rule out there and one team being successful once doing things one way is not a proof of anything
The Voices of Bluey w/ Uncle Stripe https://www.20k.org/episodes/thevoicesofbluey
The Organic Sound of Bluey w/ Sound Designer Dan Brumm https://www.20k.org/episodes/thesoundofbluey
> * it was the beginnings of social media in the early 2010s*
- IRC + NNTP newsgroups were already popular by 1989.
- Myspace was quite popular by 2004.
- Facebook was popular by... 2006 I guess?
and that's just a few platforms I can mention.