The same thing could happen with yours and Sams work provided Falcom is aware that such a quality translation even exists. I would suggest to inform people at Falcom about your work before the patch is released because there is a better chance of success.
It's strange/silly hearing people think that such rare 1-in-a-million occurrences could be just around the corner again when there's little evidence to support that level of enthusiasm for it...
Bear with the soapbox tangent here:
How many times has this occurred in history, an official videogame publisher deciding to acquire fan translated results in the last 20 years ? The first that I know of in videogame history was with me and the main translator I recruited, Jeff "DeuceBag" Nussbaum, in May 2010, and that was handled horribly in a criminal, divisive, discriminatory fashion where they intentionally pit the language translator against the programmer, as the employee (Thomas Lipschultz) that pitched the idea to his boss, Ken Berry (an ex-SquareSoft manager!), hated me and his presentation about me guaranteed the criminal end result...
Whatever the case, a horrible precedent was set which they stand by and their rabid fans agree, the translator can sneak around with translated results sitting on his/her computer, run off with them with a commercial entity, profit/pocket 100% of the payment, 100% of the credit, then disappear ever since and play stupid about it... According to them, that's how it's always supposed to work, and maybe if they don't hate the programmer, they could throw a nice little Special Thanks back-of-the-bus credit, assuming their employees don't dig up any dirt on him/her to then deny even that show of respect/appreciation...
You really have to trust who you're working with, and backstabbing is common place all over when it comes to fan translations... Shimarisu, my main Ys IV translator, was caught selling prepatched CD-Rs on eBay thanks to our translation project with original Ys IV CD-ROMs. Somebody reported it to me, I confronted her, and she just declared, "It's MY translation!" and that was all there was to it, much like how DeuceBag behaved with
X.X.XSEED Games...Before all of that, before even Tobias crawled out of the sewers to press his first Sapphire bootleg, a guy called Tru put up CD-Rs on eBay for sale with my Xak III patch on them! It broke our friendship for years, but he eventually apologized and it even led us to doing the Startling Odyssey II project... Shimarisu eventually apologized too, but our friendship never really recovered after that either. I wouldn't have cared if she had informed me about it, I would've told her to keep 100% of whatever she made, of course I would have to tell others in the project as it wouldn't technically be fair to them for such a public commercial situation, but it's the sneaking around, the backstabbing that gets to me... You can't trust anybody, I don't care how much you might think you're friends with said person so fair warning!
So, you have a horrible commercializing precedent with future implications where the programmer(s) has to watch his/her back in any fan translation team and must have absolute trust in their translator if something like this ever occurs again on a very modern game... It's never gonna happen with old retro games or the odds are just way way smaller, but if you're fan translating modern, powerful Windows PC games, it's something to keep in mind and really trust the person you're working with, and perhaps make agreements with your translator on the possibility, as small as it is if it ever happened again. In my case, any agreements with DeuceBag, all would've been ignored as he had contempt for me all along that he hid well, he broke and lied about other agreements, so yeah, even then you really have to know and trust the other person(s) you're working with!
In short, don't worry about this ever happening with old retro games... It's a silly, fanboy wet dream. I know of no precedent for it - feel free to provide one if you do (
your citing a case with Tomato/Nintendo which never happened, only your hope)... But, I do know of a precedent if working on powerful, modern 3D Windows PC games or PSP such as "Ys: Oath in Felghana" which have real, future market potential to sell well, just that, you also have horrible shenanigans that go along with it and I wouldn't be all that excited as a programmer in a fan translation team given how that went down and all the claims that's how it's "supposed to work..."
