You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
0

[–] 13177736? ago 

It was the center point of your argument. You said pirating deprives developers of their compensation (which is false) and of their rights to control their work (they do not have this right in the first place).

Then I expressed myself badly. What I mean to say with developers is the entity which holds the rights. Not that it actually matters that much, since any industry is an ecosystem and anything that harms the corporations goes down to harm the ground-level developers. You could say that the suits should get the pay-cut instead of the engineers, but videogame suits already take a huge pay-cut for being in the games industry instead of elsewhere. And those above must earn a lot of money, so that it is in the best interest to actually lead the corporation to success, and not conspire with an enemy to sink the corporation for a huge reward.
The suits are a necessary part of the videogame industry ecosystem.
And if programmers can't be paid less(which they certainly can), then they will be fired.

Game developers on average make next to nothing for what they do. The ones that get rich are the ones with their own studio making and selling their own games. But only if they make a game that gets big.

And that's one of the biggest problems of the videogame industry, that it is boom or bust, and thus extremely risky to make your own studio. No matter how well you do it, if there isn't enough marketing, or it doesn't work as well as expected, or there is another game that has taken all the eyeballs, the studio will be broke and unable to make more games, and the ground-level developers will get fired. If they took a pay-cut and went back with their parents or borrowed money to survive until the game released and they were to become rich as many start-ups and indies do, and it doesn't happen, they are fucked and lost a few years. That is shitty.

But do you know what is the purpose of those faceless corporations? The reason why developers join with them instead of doing it alone, is because these corporations eat the risk. Partnering with a corporation means that they get a more stable job. Most games bomb, and instead of losing their jobs, the studio can survive for another try, or if not, the developers get shuffled elsewhere. Corporations mitigate risk.

But corporations aren't in the business of charity or art. They do it to get money from the earnings, if they can't get a huge boom from one lucky game, at least a few solid games. That's why they control games and add lootboxes and remove the soul, because they have to mitigate the risk. Given how big games are now, they can't take many failures.

The question then is why games have to be so big, but that's the nature of the industry. Boom or bust, the biggest game gets all the rewards, the second gets a pittance and the third gets nothing(well, maybe it's the ninth game or something, but you get what I mean). Corporations rightfully seek profit, and that's where the profit is. I think that an industry of mostly medium-sized AA titles like Hellblade, games with a good budget and still with soul, would be better. But unluckily, that's not how it is.
Luckily there are still many indies.

Are developers exploited and underpaid? Yes. From what I've read at http://askagamedev.tumblr.com/ a huge part of crunch was due to mismanagement, and now that the industry has matured a bit it has lessened. But still the salary of everyone involved is much lower than in other industries, and developers can still suffer crunch.
But that is a market problem. An over-supply of young developers leads to depression of salaries, offer and demand. It doesn't help that earnings are lesser than in other industries, that the industry is so risky, and that they are willing to work for peanuts because of passion.

But that is capitalism. The corporations and studios have done what they should. Corporations and owners have the right to seek profit, and publicly-owned company must seek profit. The situation of devs is sad, but that is capitalism. If you want to fix the situation, you must fix the market imbalance, it's the only way.

I understand that you, and many gamers, don't like the megacorporations which rule the AAA space. But they are necessary. If not, the market would have removed them. Sure, pirating doesn't directly hurt the ground-level developers, only those asshole corporations. But less money for the corporations means less money to give to studios, which means smaller studios and smaller games, which ends up with developers losing their jobs, the remaining ones having their pay cut, and less games being made, which hurts us gamers. Piracy in the end, only makes things worse for all involved.

0
1

[–] Wahaha 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Now you are on to something. What you fail to realize is that what we want is, in fact, smaller studios and smaller games and less developers. Then the guys in their garage making a game get eyeballs again. Instead of failing, simply because they couldn't afford the marketing to stand out among the thousands of other games that got released this week.