One other thing this reminds me of: it is possibly to royally screw up your life by simply signing the wrong contract. Seems to be very common, too.
I've had it happen, too (not life-screwing, but bad contracts): back in the day a publisher sold my J2ME app and I decided I wanted royalty shares instead of a fixed sum. The app sold 20000 times for 5€ each - I got 1000€. The thing is, they didn't actually sell the app. They gave it to a TV company for almost nothing in exchange for free advertising. So my royalties weren't a percentage of 5€, they were a percentage of maybe 30 cents... For the publisher, it was a way to promote themselves.
On the other hand, I see it relaxed: I had been toying with the idea of that app for years, and only when the publisher got interested did I really kick into gear and finish it. So at least I have to thank them for one published/finished project. Also, who knows what the sales would have been like without the TV advertising. And, I almost expected something to go wrong the first time I did something like this, so I chalked it up as a learning experience.
This kind of thing happens a lot. A favorite trick is to "bundle" your app with some useless add-on, and then split the revenue between your app and the add-on, halving your royalty. The way to get past that is to have a minimum royalty per unit, and a minimum aggregate royalty per quarter.
I was even vaguely aware of this possibility, but of course the publisher refused to agree on a minimum royalty per unit. Somehow I still agreed on the contract - engineers and negotiation... They actually mentioned the bundling option as an argument, but it was supposed to be a long tail thing for later on.
At least I insisted on having a fixed share (percentage) of the actual sale price, because I had read before that it is common to have so much losses by accounting that there is nothing left to have a share from. It didn't occur to me that they would give away the app for free.
Of course it is almost impossible to disentangle: they could have given the app away for free to some other company, but actually have some shares in that company. Maybe I should have evaluated the value of the advertising they received and demand a share of that.
I've had it happen, too (not life-screwing, but bad contracts): back in the day a publisher sold my J2ME app and I decided I wanted royalty shares instead of a fixed sum. The app sold 20000 times for 5€ each - I got 1000€. The thing is, they didn't actually sell the app. They gave it to a TV company for almost nothing in exchange for free advertising. So my royalties weren't a percentage of 5€, they were a percentage of maybe 30 cents... For the publisher, it was a way to promote themselves.
On the other hand, I see it relaxed: I had been toying with the idea of that app for years, and only when the publisher got interested did I really kick into gear and finish it. So at least I have to thank them for one published/finished project. Also, who knows what the sales would have been like without the TV advertising. And, I almost expected something to go wrong the first time I did something like this, so I chalked it up as a learning experience.