It's not wrong of you to want it, but it's very wrong of you to expect it. If one of the code modules I wrote at the job I had 10 years ago gets used in a customer system today, do you think my old place of employment sends me a check? Of course not. I wrote that code when I worked there, because that was my job, and I got paid for doing it. It's not my code, it belongs to the company I worked for when I wrote it.
While I tend to agree with your sentiment, you can also look at it this way: When you pay the publisher, you're directly rewarding the people who agreed to put up the enormous pile of money the creative people needed in order to design a game for you to play. If enough people do that, the publisher might even be persuaded to put up another enormous pile of money again sometime in the future.

You consider giving money to people who made a great game a good thing... What would you say about people who continuously give the devs money before the game is out, out of faith that it'll be great? These people are the publishers. They front the money, they pay the salaries of every single guy and girl on the project, all they get in return are the right to benefit financially from the final product.
Buying games, as such, isn't directly rewarding the developers - it's sending a signal to the publishers: "This is the sort of thing people want to pay for. Hire a dev team to create a sequel or something similar". By supporting publishers we are supporting the studios they hire and giving them incentives to create the games we like.
Aside from code wrought in free time, the only way around that is Kickstarter. Then again - it's a place where private "investors" act much in the way seasoned publishers do - they mostly support well-known people and promising sequels ;P.

Well, I see development of a computer game as a highly creative process, more akin to writing a fiction book, than coding a program. And for some reason I imagined that this brand of work has to be rewarded with royalties. However, I searched for typical agreements that my local book-publishers make with authors and turns out - those mostly involve one time payments (although in rare cases royalty based as well).
Obviously, that logic doesn't work when both original developer and publisher are long since out of business...

That's similar to what I was thinking. There's plenty of folks in the entertainment business that don't see royalties.

I suppose it would be nice when I buy a DVD movie if part of that money went to actor X, director X, or the camerman, etc, every time, but that's not always how it works. Same goes with anything else that I purchase.

If you want royalties, then you have to secure them beforehand. If you didn't have the capital to begin with, whether that be investment money or marketability, then chances are whoever does fork over the capital will get the royalties.

But it does. As the current owner sees that "hey this old thing we own is still popular enough to earn us money" they might start to think "perhaps we'd get more money if we pay someone to make something new that relates to this old thing". And that "new" might even be good, if we (as gamers and fans of the "old") are lucky.

Actual circumstances can vary from one game to the next, but the developers themselves might never get a cut to begin with. They might get a bonus if the game sells well in the first year, but the majority of people in the industry earn a salary and don't get any royalties.

In principle, this makes sense; the publisher typically is the one who pays for development, and is assuming a fairly large financial risk in doing so. For every classic that remains commercially viable decades later, there are hundreds of flops that never turned a profit. It's only fair that the one that takes the risk also reap the reward. There is the unfortunate irony that consumers can't directly support the creators, but the system in itself is not the issue. The problems emerge from the fact that the negotiating table is stacked heavily in favor of those with deep pockets.

Very few people can afford to go for years without a salary, which means walking away from a bad deal isn't always an option. Similarly, if you end up in a dispute with your investor you'll need a massive legal budget and the financial stability to weather potentially years of litigation to take on a powerful corporation in court. Even a slam-dunk case can be difficult to win. Creative people also tend to be intensely focused on their creative passions; when it comes to business deals they're out of their element and easily outmaneuvered by lawyers and other professionals that specialize in that kind of stuff. That's why creators are often left holding the short end of the stick.

It's a distinct irony that consumers cannot directly support the creators in many cases, and sometimes we see talented people tragically exploited, but some of those people actually did walk away with nice paychecks and bonuses for their work.

Keep in mind, though, that publishers use the revenue of one project to fund another, so in a way at least part of your money ends up with the creative guys, just not necessarily the ones who specifically made the game you just bought.

Sure it does. The very fact that the game is on sale means that somebody owns the rights to it. Whether or not it's the same publisher who originally paid to have it developed, or another publisher who bought the old one (or even just bought the IP) is beside the point. By buying it, you're still sending the signal that whatever money they spent so they could sell that game was a good investment. The best way to ensure that games you like will continue to be sold is to keep buying games you like.

Guys, we're talking different things here. It goes without saying that demand creates it's own supply. But initially this topic was not about stimulating development of specific kinds of games. It was about rewarding specific people for their amazing creations. And in the current state of affairs it is only possible if publisher decides to re-hire the same team of developers to do a sequel or whatever based on good sale numbers of their previous project.
Umm, please remind me, exactly how is "the system in itself not the issue" here? Everything that you mentioned are the traits of the system and I will even add two of the more fundamental ones.
First: We're dealing with information here. Information, which is not physical and cannot be treated as such in terms of economy. How should it be treated then? Short answer - nobody knows. Currently, there is no generally accepted view on this matter, even in theory.
And second: The rise of digital distribution reduces the publisher's involvement down to investing money into developer's work and then living off of it indefinitely. Where formerly there were problems of data medium creation and logistics, which justified publisher's presence in a "manufacturer to customer" relationship, now there is just an occasional lawsuit against copyright infringers. Which is why a lot of smaller developer teams opt to monetize their games on their own using such initiatives as Humble Indie Bundle and Steam Greenlight for promotion.

I know, I chose to respond how I did because that's how the discussion had evolved. Sometimes the original creators do get hired by the IP owners (whether or not the IP has changed hands) because they think that's the best course of action. Case in point: several of those who worked on Fallout: New Vegas were in the teams for the first two games.

If you want to give money to the original creators, do so; find out about their new projects and support them. If you want more games in the same series, try aiming for that goal; raise awareness about the series (talk to people, use social media and web forums) and see if it's possible to get in touch with the IP owners, or just try to increase sales of it, if it's still being sold (perhaps in repackaged editions). In some cases, the creators actually do own their work, and the ideal is fullfilled, in most cases that's not the case.

But no, being in the team producing a game doesn't automagically give you royalties from all future sales, it depends on the contract with your employer and the employer's contract with the publisher who funded development. If the development studio writes off all rights to the publisher, the publisher is, of course, free to sell the whole shebang to someone else without the studio's involvement.

Or, you know, help fund Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/[OtherCrownFunding] projects.

Of course, you can never be certain that the development studio does not later sell all rights to someone else. That's kind of in their right to do.

True, you can start investing in Kickstarter and Early Access on Steam.

Like you said, though, even then you don't know for sure. You have to have inside info on who is involved and where the money is going, who has what contract, etc.

You would basically have to be an attorney for the parties involved acting as if you're an agent or something, in order to make sure the money goes where you want it to go.

You keep this IP, whether or not that's financially viable, because I like it, and I want you to get all gains from it. So make sure you keep it or I'll sue you!

Kind of like that?

There are some instances where the actual developers retrained or reacquired the rights, like , [url=http://www.gog.com/games##devpub=revolution_software]Revolution, Chris & Aaron (Wordplay is Aaron Conners' company) with Tex Murphy etc.

This was initially one of the main draws for me to buying here as well, but indeed Kickstarter serves this purpose in better ways lately.