The tradition we turned out to be part of

The model was invented from first principles at hour eight of a decade-old project. Only later did we learn it has a name, and a lineage measured in centuries.

The model was not adopted from a book. It was invented at the start of XJ Music, from first principles, because it was the only arrangement that seemed honest. After the first eight hours of work, the entire project was eight points of equity, all held by the founder — and every hour since has entered the pool by the same arithmetic. That system has now governed a cap table across 14,772 logged hours and a decade of collaborators without a single equity dispute.

Then, at GDC 2026, a session titled “Co-Ops Are the Future” — given by the founders of Comradery, itself a worker cooperative — made something plain. This “invention” has a name, and the name is old. Allocating ownership and surplus by labor contributed is the patronage principle of the worker-cooperative tradition. Pricing every human hour identically is the time-banking principle. We had been running a co-op economic engine since hour eight and hadn’t known what to call it.

We consider independent reinvention the strongest possible endorsement of a model: it is what honest first-principles reasoning converges on when nobody is in the room to argue for a founder multiple.

A lineage measured in centuries

Once you know what to look for, the ancestry is unmistakable.

It starts with the Fenwick Weavers’ Society in Scotland in 1761 — the earliest recorded cooperative society, weavers pooling their trade. Sixty-six years later, in 1827, Josiah Warren’s Cincinnati Time Store priced goods in labor notes denominated in hours — “cost the limit of price,” an hour of one person’s work traded against an hour of another’s. Robert Owen took the same idea to scale in 1832 with the National Equitable Labour Exchange, where labour notes circulated as currency backed by hours of work.

In 1844 the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers wrote down the principles that are still the backbone of cooperative identity today — among them the one that matters most here: surplus distributed in proportion to member participation. That is patronage, and that is what points are. A century later, in 1956, the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country proved worker cooperation could run at industrial scale, tens of thousands of worker-owners deep.

The other half of the model shows up most sharply in the 1980s, when Edgar Cahn’s TimeBanking made the radical move explicit: one hour equals one time credit, for everyone, for any service. An hour is an hour is an hour — the surgeon’s and the student’s, priced the same. Take patronage from Rochdale and the radical equality of hours from time banking, apply both to equity rather than to wages or services, and you have arrived, from a different direction, at one point per hour on the same schedule for everyone. The International Cooperative Alliance codified the seven cooperative principles — including democratic member control and member economic participation — in 1995 and reaffirmed them in 2016.

And it is alive in games right now. Motion Twin, the Bordeaux studio behind Dead Cells, has run on equal pay and equal vote since 2001 — a commercially elite game made by a workers’ co-op. KO_OP in Montréal has built on “equal pay and equal say” since 2012. And a current wave — Comradery, The Glory Society, Pixel Pushers Union 512, and others organizing across the game industry — is the company this studio is glad to keep, and the wave that produced the GDC talk that named what XJ had been doing all along.

Where this model actually sits

Standard startup equity answers “the founder’s hour versus a helper’s hour” with negotiated grants and founder multiples. Dynamic-split schemes like Slicing Pie answer it by weighting each person’s contribution by their market rate — a specialist’s hour worth more slices than a generalist’s. A statutory worker co-op answers it with patronage on the economics and one member, one vote on control.

This model takes the co-op’s answer and adds the time-bank move: identical points on the same schedule, regardless of role. Then it contributes one mechanism of its own back to the tradition — the schedule curve, where cash compensation buys down the point rate continuously and publicly, per hour, instead of separating salary and equity into two opaque systems. (That curve is its own piece: cash buys down points.)

We make no claim to have improved on the tradition. We claim only to have arrived at it honestly, stress-tested one corner of it for a decade, and published the receipts. See the model demonstrated end to end on the studio’s own work — the XJ founders pool — where every number is hours times a rate you can check.

Sources

This describes how the studio shares ownership. It is not legal, tax, securities, or investment advice, and nothing here is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell a security or to invest money.