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[Criptfeind]

...which is why "There are other monetization options"

Which... Piracy and no copy right would still destroy. These people make money off mainly advertisements. At least for the most part. Merchandizing can sometimes be a significant part of it, but often not.

If you destroyed copy write, some of these people, although important to note that not all, it would likely effect less established brands, in the short term at least. Could have serious issues. Content aggregators could simply take the videos made, host them on their own site, run their own adds over them and not give a dime to the creators.

In fact. This is a thing that already happens. Although at least now people have a legal recourse and when a site does it too much and too openly they can be at least sorta stopped.


Anyway. I think we understand that occasionally larger enterprises are made, and are even good. But I am sorta wondering if you think that all large movies and games and such could and would be made in such a system. Or if you are saying you would rather have a system that is mostly tiny indie free games and movies (many of which nowadays make money based on the advertising system and could also be screwed over by no copywrite.) and the occasional mid sized piece of content.

Essentially, do you think a game like Skyrim could exist in the world you are envisioning, or do you want a world where games like that don't exist?

Although, going over the games I spend 99% of my time playing, yeah I don't think I would actually be effected by this, but still,  I think most people would disagree with the second outcome.

[Darkmere]

Yeah my point has already been illustrated. If people don't get paid to create content, they just literally can't put in the same amount of time creating, developing, and polishing content. Thus, the quality drops.

[Frumple]

... I think you mean quantity, there. If the same amount of time isn't available, that just means the same amount of quality takes longer to achieve, not that it somehow can't be achieved anymore.

[Vector]

Nah, you're assuming that a person will have the steam to complete even one magnum opus if it takes 10 or 15 years instead of 2 or 3.

[LordSlowpoke]

Nah, you're assuming that a person will have the steam to complete even one magnum opus if it takes 10 or 15 years instead of 2 or 3.

First of all, IT LIVES

second of all let's not forget on whose forum we are shall we :3

i'm just going to point out things while not making an argument hope you don't mind

[Vector]

There's plenty of people who can create beautiful things but wouldn't be able to keep together the motivation like Toady has, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[LordBucket]

do you think a game like Skyrim could exist in the world you are envisioning,
or do you want a world where games like that don't exist?

Please humor me for a moment. It will be more fun to answer in this way.

*ahem*

Once upon a time, in a faraway fantasy world there was a race of creatures who used pressed wood-pulp sheets to store information. Collections of these sheets were known as "books" and there was a very special type of book known as an "encyclopedia."

The encyclopedia was a collection of these wold-pulp pages containing mostly text and a few black and white pictures on a number of topics. A typical 26 volume encyclopieda set might have as many as 40,000 articles. To collate and assemble this vast work might require as many as 72 full time employees to edit and and supervise the project. These were people with families, being paid full-time wages and given medical and dental benefits.

Try to imagine being in that world, growing up in it...maybe even being one of those people who made a very good living for your whole family by building these marvelous devices.

And now...try to imagine someone telling you that you could have a magic "virtual" encyclopedia that instead of a few tens of thousands of articles would have over four million articles, that would be updated daily by an army of 70,000 editors. The pages would not be black and white but full color. And your editors would be so dedicated and vigilant that when a new event happened, it would be entered into your magic encyclopedia that very same day. In fact, they would compete with each other to see who could contribute the most current and accurate information. And the best part? You wouldn't have to pay them. They would do the work for free, as a hobby, for fun...because they wanted to.

If you were that person, hearing this...with your 26 volume encyclopedia set that you paid $800 for sitting on your shelf, and someone told you this...would you believe them?

And yet, nevertheless...http://en.wikipedia.org

>do you think a game like Skyrim could exist in the world you are envisioning

What do you think?

[Frumple]

There's plenty of people who can create beautiful things but wouldn't be able to keep together the motivation like Toady has, and there's nothing wrong with that.

... which is one of those reasons cooperative ventures and FOSS software structures are so wonderful. There doesn't have to be people like Toady to create things like DF. There can be a bunch of people with limited motivation hopping in and out as time and motivation allows, and things still get done. There can be one primary driver and several people who contribute to limited degrees, that massively reduce development time or improve quality (I'd point to something like Tales of Maj'Eyal as an example of that). There's issues with that kind of structure that we're still working on, but, well, that's something that'll be hammered out in due time.

Nah, you're assuming that a person will have the steam to complete even one magnum opus if it takes 10 or 15 years instead of 2 or 3.

I really think you're overestimating the time difference, here. From what I've seen, when you actually get the right team together, the development cycle between a commercial and non-commercial venture isn't that egregiously different. The primary "gap" right now is in regards to raw number of bodies -- commercial ventures have a much easier time distributing the work over a lot of people (since they can effectively bribe people into helping), but in a system where that possibility doesn't exist, you'd likely have a lot more volunteers. Less, yes, so the amount of projects would be lesser, but you'd still have the body count necessary to get projects done in a reasonable time frame. It would likely take more time, yes, due the smaller working group, but you'd be looking at maybe an extra year or two, not an extra decade.

[Criptfeind]

What do you think?

So.

No.

[Vector]

. . . Okay, I'm going to go out on a limb.  That model would not work for me personally.  I am a loner and creating things is pretty much my way of communicating with the world, so being yet another little cog of someone else's message would be unsatisfying and unmotivating.  I have a lot of skills I can bring to the table, but in the end I am best suited to a Toady-style effort.  And, more than that, my efforts tend to be short-lived and intense.  If you want to best use my skills, pay me to churn out a new small project every three to six months, with larger projects going on in the background over the course of two or three years.  I will produce a hell of a lot of high-quality stuff.  But you know what?  I am so skilled because my rampant emotional insecurities led me there, and it's the same insecurities that mean I want credit.  And there's a lot of people like me.

I'm not saying I'm the most important thing here, but I do want you to know that the copyright model is the best thing for certain kinds of creators right now.  Don't act like we'll swap to crowd-sourcing and it will be happy funtimes for all the creators, who will happily provide their work for free without any recompense or recognition.

[Bauglir]

There's plenty of people who can create beautiful things but wouldn't be able to keep together the motivation like Toady has, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Moreover, Toady gets paid from the work he does, in the form of donations, and makes an effort to maintain some control over DF-related intellectual property, as far as I can tell. He's not exactly a counterexample, except against the idea that corporate code farms are necessary for quality games, which I don't think is an argument Vector's making.

-snip-

Those structures create different kinds of art than a single person working on their own vision, and they aren't prohibited by the existence of copyright or other IP law, so I'm not really sure how they're relevant.

EDIT: I be ninja'd again.

[scriver]

do you think a game like Skyrim could exist in the world you are envisioning,
or do you want a world where games like that don't exist?

Please humor me for a moment. It will be more fun to answer in this way.

*ahem*

Once upon a time, in a faraway fantasy world there was a race of creatures who used pressed wood-pulp sheets to store information. Collections of these sheets were known as "books" and there was a very special type of book known as an "encyclopedia."

The encyclopedia was a collection of these wold-pulp pages containing mostly text and a few black and white pictures on a number of topics. A typical 26 volume encyclopieda set might have as many as 40,000 articles. To collate and assemble this vast work might require as many as 72 full time employees to edit and and supervise the project. These were people with families, being paid full-time wages and given medical and dental benefits.

Try to imagine being in that world, growing up in it...maybe even being one of those people who made a very good living for your whole family by building these marvelous devices.

And now...try to imagine someone telling you that you could have a magic "virtual" encyclopedia that instead of a few tens of thousands of articles would have over four million articles, that would be updated daily by an army of 70,000 editors. The pages would not be black and white but full color. And your editors would be so dedicated and vigilant that when a new event happened, it would be entered into your magic encyclopedia that very same day. In fact, they would compete with each other to see who could contribute the most current and accurate information. And the best part? You wouldn't have to pay them. They would do the work for free, as a hobby, for fun...because they wanted to.

If you were that person, hearing this...with your 26 volume encyclopedia set that you paid $800 for sitting on your shelf, and someone told you this...would you believe them?

And yet, nevertheless...http://en.wikipedia.org

>do you think a game like Skyrim could exist in the world you are envisioning

What do you think?

So your answer, in less words, is "it could totally happen! You just have to take my word for it!" instead of explaining how it would work. With insinuations that our peasant minds just can't understand how or lacks the vision to.

[WealthyRadish]

The current system of game development seems quite flawed, and I'd imagine that it will restructure at some point in the near future. If I understand the system correctly, publishers contract market researches to decide what type game would sell well (assuming they're not just whoring out an existing franchise), contract a studio to make it, cut the studio loose when it's "done" (unless the publisher owns the studio), and then rake in the profit for the rest of the license's life. The only way the developers themselves are affected by piracy is if they're either self published or if piracy results in lower sales, so long as the publisher then mistakenly blames those lost sales on the quality of development by the studio instead of the dubious specter of piracy.

So you have businesspeople (who know nothing about video games) deciding which games are made and paying developers the bare minimum they can, the vast majority of whom got into the industry out of passion for the medium. The game is rushed, buggy, and includes a bunch of crap the publisher forced in as a result of 'market research', but still manages a profit because it had an expensive marketing campaign that got people to preorder before realizing it was shit. Eventually the planets align and a publisher accidentally allows a fresh, new game to be good, and then that title is remade 12 times over 10 years until it's completely dead. I can't possibly imagine that this is the most effective way of making labor intensive games... maybe I've got it all wrong and all that was just my crazy bias, but it seems to me that the publisher model is getting less effective each year.

[Vector]

I agree completely that Big Publishing is full of shit and that digital distro/self-publishing of physical copies is the way of the future.  I just don't think "no one gets paid anything" as part of digital distro is going to be acceptable.

[MonkeyHead]

Last time this discussion came up on here, I made a point that seemed to resonate, so I shall make it again. Piracy is stealing from those that have the rights (rightly or wrongly) to distribute material, not those that have created it (who in all probability have sold thier creation to a larger entity to get it out there and make money), unless both entities in this case are one and the same, which is not a common case. So, as a result of this, it is the indie sector that seems to me to be the ones with the most to lose. EA/Fox/Paramount/EMI/whoever will still make millions from legitamate sales, and the devs/writers/actors/whatever still get thier paycheck -  piracy is not going to make much of a difference there unless an organised mass piracy event occurs, which given current laws is improbable at best.

To me this suggests that given modern media distribution methods, the current one to many "record agency" style method of distribution of material is outmoded. Platforms like Steam work well as a middle man that cuts out the middle man, so to speak. People will still need to charge for thier product, as people have to eat and pay rent. If you would give over your labour/time/skillset for free you are a chump.