There's no easy way to say this

Yes and no.

To illustrate your excellent point about how companies exploit passion, there are still some extremely small minded self aggrandizing sexist bigoted loud mouthed horrendous toddler Neanderthals throwing tantrums and insults and lighting toxic waste trash fires and melting down in public out there, exemplified by the shamefully long and sordid track record of Alex St. John [1], who even his daughter Amilia deplores [2].

But fortunately most of the rest of the game industry deplores Alex St. John just as much as his own daughter does, so thanks to her and others like EA Widow bravely stepping up and speaking out, things are gradually improving.

Amilia St. John proves her point by quoting her father's own vile words in her article "I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech" [3]:

"And finally, here we are at this written hemorrhoid from my father’s blog:"

“Why do young white males tend to be the ones who pick up computers, teach themselves to code, start businesses in their basements with their friends and get rich? It’s an obvious opportunity to everybody isn’t it? If you are a different race, gender, or religion… what’s your excuse? I know of very very few successful bootstrapped tech companies founded by women or blacks.” -Alex St. John

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/alex-st-johns-sexist-recruitm...

[2] http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/21/11479710/alex-st-johns-daug...

[3] https://medium.com/@milistjohn/i-am-alex-st-john-s-daughter-...

On a brighter and more constructive note, I will also quote Amilia St. John's list of useful resources:

"If you are an individual interested in furthering the fight to improve ratios for women and minorities in the industry, there are so many opportunities to get involved! Start a female and minority hackathon, volunteer to mentor young women and minorities in computer science, or even just start by learning more.

Here is a {short} list of other resources to get you started."

http://girlswhocode.com/ -An excellent nonprofit with a focus on teaching women k-12 how to code. They make it relatively easy to start (or join) a group in your area!

http://www.code2040.org/ -An awesome site with a focus on blacks and latinos in the coding industry

http://www.2020shift.com/ -Focus on minorities in hybrid careers in the tech business. I love this website because it is all about entering the tech world if you ARE NOT in a technical career.

https://www.codecademy.com/ -A great start to dive in to the basics of coding.

https://scratch.mit.edu/ -This is an amazing tool for young children learning how to code. It teaches children to think logically while removing the syntax hurdles.

https://blog.hootsuite.com/four-inspiring-women-in-tech/ -Some killer tech giants who are making a difference.

http://ghc.anitaborg.org/ -Grace Hopper is a female and minority focused conference. I have unfortunately never had the opportunity to go but I constantly hear what an amazing experience it is. Students can earn scholarships to finance their trip.

http://codepen.io/ -This site is a personal favorite tool. It is such a fun playground for front end development. It allows you code while simultaneously working with HTML, CSS and Javascript and it is so flexible. It is all buffed out with preprocessors galore.

- If you want to continue the conversation, hit me up at anytime on twitter, my handle is @milistjohn

TO put this in perspective, they made about $60 million, and paid out probably less than $60 thousand total as salary here in the 1.5 ish years the game has been out.

By accepting the job, you should know exactly what you signed up for. Just like "you should know" all laws directly relevant to your life.

It's entirely likely they didn't know that - apparently none of the people working on it were told how much it sold and the company tried to stop outsiders estimating its sales figures through services like SteamSpy.

To repeat what Eric said, I'm not "going after" anybody, particularly not the employees. They didn't like their working conditions, so they quit. Absolutely nothing wrong with what they did. My original post was mainly driven by confusion: many commenters talked about their yearly salary as though it is abnormally low. Hence my confusion about why these programmers would accept a job with an abnormally low salary.

Regarding immoral behavior on the part of the employer: I still don't buy that either. Someone can be a bad employer (ie, one that i would never want to work for), and still be perfectly morally upstanding. If someone, in a competitive labor marketplace, takes on a job which has low pay, I don't think they can accuse their employer of immoral behavior because of low pay. Such accusations should be saved for those scums that pull a bait-and-switch and refuse to honor their promises.