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Money, Dear Boy is about getting a paycheck for participating in something that is obviously beneath their talents. It doesn't apply to every actor who ever starred in anything for a paycheck. They need to eat, too.
You're saying "commission", but by including writers, actors, and game designers, most of them will either be self-employed entrepreneurs ("indie developers" on a shoestring budget) or working for a company, also known as Capitalism.
When Mark Meer provides the voice of Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, I reckon that BioWare pays him fair wages for the audio files that he helps to create, regardless of how well the games sell. I suppose they're commissioning his voice. Is that really tropeworthy?
If you meant something else, perhaps the question should be amended.
Edited by KD
I guess I should have been more specific that it has to do with fanfic.
Risk It All is written by the author who is being directly paid by a patron on Patreon to produce. Several of the ideas, such as the power system, belong the patron, who is directly paying the author to write about it in detail.
Edited by reppuzan
Yeah, a commission is when one patron (or sometimes a small group of patrons) pays a self-employed artist to create a work to their specifications. This is opposed to the model where the artist makes art on their own initiative, and has to hope someone will buy the piece when it's finished. Under the commission system, there's no need to appeal to the masses to turn a profit: you only need to satisfy the whims of your patron.
I guess it could be analogous to an artist working long-term for some company (in that you're creating to the specifications of one employer), but a commission is usually a one-time thing, rather than a steady paycheck.
I believe the traditional idea of a commission is that the art is itself the end goal. Either the patron has an idea they want to see brought into the world, but lacks the time and skill to do it themselves—or they just want the prestige of owning an exclusive piece by a renowned artist. In that regard it strikes me as a bizarro-world version of Doing It for the Art, where the artist is just doing it for a paycheck, but the person writing the paycheck just cares about the art.
So paying an artist for their work so that you can incorporate it into a commercial product and sell for a profit (as in the example of voice actors getting a flat paycheck for their role in video game) is technically similar, but it's not the sort of thing people are thinking of when they say a work is "a commission". (Also for actors in movies, games, TV shows, etc., almost always get the option to be paid a percentage of the gross and/or profit of the finished work, even if they decline it for a flat paycheck instead. Thanks to Hollywood Accounting, taking a percentage of the profit is a sucker's move.)
I didn't write any of that.
^
Yeah, this. I was wondering if there was a trope for that, but it sounds like there isn't.
Is there a trope, Trivia, YMMV, or otherwise, for when a work is created on commission for someone else (i.e. someone is directly paying the writer/actor/game designer) to create something? The closest I can think of is Money, Dear Boy.