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Creative industries have always struggled with how to adequately compensate their writers. As Fallout returns to Prime Video later this month for Season 2, it will lean heavily on the Fallout: New Vegas game. However, that doesn’t mean that the people who wrote New Vegas and created its assortment of iconic characters will get paid.

John Gonzalez was the lead writer on Fallout: New Vegas, and, in a recent interview, he noted that even though Amazon and Bethesda are still profiting off his work and the work of his team, that isn’t translating to more money for him. “It is very odd to see characters that I created showing up in other media,” Gonzalez explained. “It’s something where there’s no credit for that, there’s no residuals for that. And that’s something that I understood doing the work early on. In some ways, I think doing narrative in video games is a little akin to doing comic book work.”

Comic book publishers have long denied creators payment for creating some of their most profitable characters. “In the ‘60s or ‘70s, it’s like, ‘Oh, you created Spider-Man? Good for you,’” Gonzalez opined. “I mean, at least we know who Steve Ditko is, right? But it doesn’t belong to you. That’s not the terms under which you do the work. So it’s weird. To me, it just shows that when Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Can first imagined this world, I think that they did something that was a master stroke.”

Gonzalez doesn’t seem bitter about his lack of residuals from the Fallout TV show, even as Prime Video stands to make a huge amount of money off the characters he helped create. In the same interview, he “really enjoyed the first season of the show.” Still, we imagine he’d enjoy it more if he were getting paid while watching it.

Prime Video's Fallout Season 2 begins December 17.

Get ready to get out of your Vault and into the Fallout world - with our help, of course. Here is a guide to the Fallout timeline, how to play and watch all of Fallout, details on the Fallout cast, how the Fallout cast & crew really get the harsh humor we're looking for, as well as a Q&A with Fallout showrunners Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner.