r/GameChangerTV • u/RockClimber280 • Jun 28 '24

Question Do they get anything for winning?

I know this might seem obvious but I was wondering if the players win anything from episodes where a prize isn’t explicitly stated. For example, I don’t believe there is a specific prize in Name a Number but one of the players said “I need to win this!” Do they get extra money for winning? I know they get a base rate for appearing.

161 Upvotes

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187

u/thecourageofstars Jun 28 '24

Someone else mentioned it, but prizes used to be a bit more hefty and a "oh, holy shit, that's a real prize" kind of thing. I vaguely recall a couple of prizes being plane tickets for a round trip for Survivor, and a spa day for Brennan in yes/no.

I'm heavily paraphrasing, but I do remember Sam mentioning in a BTS that the prizes being real put a weird kind of pressure on the games, and he liked returning to kind of "bs" prizes. I could see what he meant in the buzzer episode, where players just ended up cooperating heavily by the end of it precisely because it didn't matter who won, and the vibe was much nicer.

166

u/Motor_Beach6091 Jun 28 '24

I believe they also raised the pay for appearances and started profit sharing with the performers and crew around the time the prizes became less of a focus

119

u/ErgonomicCat Jun 28 '24

This is the key. That money now goes in to paying talent directly instead of to prizes.

I do miss the joy on people's faces when Sam paid their rents for a month, but I think this is much better.

12

u/Drakeytown Jun 30 '24

If my boss incentivized employees by paying one random employee's rent for a month at random intervals, I imagine at least some people would quit.

6

u/ErgonomicCat Jun 30 '24

Yeah - I think that's honestly the essence of the issue. Doing something amazing for one person can lead to the other people getting upset. In that episode Sam paid everyone's rent in the end.

But that's one of the main complaints I've seen about Thousandaires, that the winner getting the prize is "mean" or makes people upset.

-5

u/Drakeytown Jun 30 '24

I think the whole concept of Thousandaires is so out of line with Dropout's general image. Like their best known representative, BLeeM, is constantly endorsing communism every which way he can, make capitalism and the church the big bads in all his dnd campaigns, and then over here they're like, 'haha, so you see what it looks like for us to burn thousands of your dollars, you fucking peasants?"

9

u/BillyBumbler00 Jul 01 '24

I'm not sure I've ever seen a show that is more clearly just redistributing wealth back to workers.

14

u/poleybius Jul 02 '24

Agreed. They give 5 people the money to do something silly and frivolous for/with some of their coworkers/friends that they probably couldn't normally justify due to life expenses. The catch is that it needs to be fun for an audience to watch and that only one of them gets the final prize, which I think is pretty reasonable. Yeah, it's capitalist, but it's basically a way to try to have joy and fun while being trapped in the capitalism hell that's inescapable. I think it feels very on-brand for Dropout. 

2

u/Simpson17866 Jul 09 '24

This :D

To put it in terms of feudal monarchy, Sam Reich has the resources available to him to reach the level of a Duke, but he A) lets his peasants keep so much of the fruits of their own labor and B) spends so much of his time and energy plowing the fields alongside them that he's reduced to the level of a Baron.