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[_Tommo_]

i think that's a misunderstanding of capitalism. the idea of employment, wages, and salary is actually anti-capitalist, not capitalist. capitalism is when people profit from what they produce (by selling their products and services)

we do not really have that situation. what we have is corporatism. most people do not profit from the work they do, they are paid to do work, and someone else profits from the work they did. but what they are paid is far less than what the work itself is worth

Actually, this is completely wrong.

"Capitalism" as a word is born to refer to the system in which the power was detained by the Capitalists, or the people who possess the Capital, aka the means of production: capital could be machines, workers, or just pure  
So capitalism has always referred a situation where there's a few who "rule" their workforce to increase their capital, and their capital's productivity. I mean, just open wikipedia and read.

And quite ironically from your point of view, what you describe as "real capitalism" with everyone earning their fair share over their produced value is... socialism or something in that league.
Marx himself based his ideology on the fact that capitalists were "stealing" from the workers because they didn't acknowledge and/or pay the workers based on the "total usefulness" of what they produced.

So uhm, please do not subvert definitions like this.

/evil communist OT  

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

there are different forms of capitalism. in the wikipedia article you reference, for instance, there are six forms of it mentioned. the form i was referring to is free market capitalism. i agree that corporate capitalism is a "form" of capitalism (it's also one of the six mentioned there), but it's about as diametrically opposed to free market capitalism as you can get

as an analogy, a parliamentary monarchy and an absolute monarchy are both technically "monarchy" but they are very different, almost opposite

[_Tommo_]

Nah, even if there are six (or probably more) forms of capitalism, each single one listed on that page has at its foundations the concept of capital (and huge corporations, and very rich people, etc), that basically forbids that _everyone_ can profit directly from his work.

Maybe even more so in free market capitalism, as with no regulations whatsoever some very important markets would invariably end up with one single megacorporation controlling them, absorbing all the value they can both from their workers and the market.

So, yeah, capitalism was never about everyone earning their fair share on their work, ever  

[Paul Jeffries]

@Paul E

I wasn't trying to say that publishing was always 'fair' (in fact, I wouldn't say that, since I don't consider 'fairness' an objectively meaningful concept) - just that the intrinsic features of a publisher - the activity of publishing itself - are not inherently harmful.  That even if all publishers currently act abysmally, it is not because they are publishers - you could conceivably have a company that acted as a publisher but that had none of the negative attributes that have been mentioned.  So, I don't believe I am using an extreme - I'm really trying to focus on the things that all publishers should theoretically have in common.

As an allegory: consider the abnormally large percentage of the prison population that is black.  You might draw a conclusion from this that black people are inherently more prone to criminality, but you would (I hope we can all agree) be wrong to do so.  There are factors at play there which are not genuinely intrinsic to skin colour.

To put this in a broader context, and to perhaps explain my motivation for debating it, what we're really talking about here is investment and capitalism itself.  I'm a Georgist, which means that I take issue with some aspects of capitalism, but quite like others.  Specifically, I think it just that people should be able to derive profits from both their own labour and through investment of capital (really, risk), but not through the monopolisation of naturally communal resources (rent).  But the public debate on these subjects at the moment (see: The Occupy Movement) has an irritating tendancy to conflate those last two and assign the negative aspects of resource monopolisation (which is always harmful to everyone bar the monopolizer) to investment (which is *usually* beneficial).  If we can't accurately diagnose the problem then we stand no chance of solving it.  I basically see this conversation as being emblematic of that wider issue and hence my interest in it: I don't care if you think publishers/investors are all bad, provided you think they are bad for valid reasons.

music publishers and book publishers, from what i hear, get about 90% of the profits, musicians and authors get around 10%. that seems like a lop-sided power balance. shouldn't it be somewhere closer to 50-50? is the marketing of something (which certainly requires money, expertise, and even creativity) really worth nine times as much as the creation of what it's marketing?

Is the 90/10% split 'fair'? Well, I can't really say - that's up to the writers and musicians involved to decide.  The publisher isn't just doing marketing though - they are also investing money to physically manufacture CDs/Books etc and more importantly they are also accepting all of the financial risk involved.  If whatever it is they are publishing doesn't sell as well as they thought it would then they are the ones that lose money, not (usually) the original creators.  Again, risk tends to get ignored to support the 'investors are parasites' story but it's actually the key to understanding these interactions.  If the deal that the publishers were getting was really as weighted in their favour as you seem to be implying, no publisher would ever go bust.

[moi]

we must first undertand the meaning of the word "indie". Or not, for that matter.

I report you to this other thread for reference:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25888.msg728386#msg728386

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

hmm -- i think that if you reject the notion of fairness (or justice, deserving, or related concepts) then that sort of makes the entire thing moot, because you then can't say that one way of doing things is better than another way; you wouldn't object to publishers no matter how hard life was for developers. developers could be literal rather than figurative slaves of publishers (e.g. working 16 hours a day on games, without pay, just given enough food and shelter to keep them alive) and it'd be fine if you reject the idea of justice. so it's a self-consistent idea, but certainly not one held by most people. the reason people object to publishers is that they believe the publishing system is unfair, not that it's less efficient than some other possibility, or that it leads to worse games by some measure, etc.

i'm also not sure how you can have a concept of harm without a concept of justice? this is a bit abstract, but i thought it was impossible to have one without the other -- e.g. can you have "good vs bad" without also having "right vs wrong"? since to say that something is fair is to say that it is right. it seems strange to have good vs bad and not have right vs wrong, i've seen both rejected together, or both accepted, but not one accepted and the other rejected

the analogy with the black population in prisons is curious though. one conclusion could be that the court system is inherently biased against blacks (i.e. unfair to them). that'd be a closer analogy to saying the publishing system is inherently biased against developers (and in favor of publishers).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

as an aside, chris tolworthy of enter the story is also a georgist indie game developer -- do you know of him?

[eld]

the analogy with the black population in prisons is curious though. one conclusion could be that the court system is inherently biased against blacks (i.e. unfair to them). that'd be a closer analogy to saying the publishing system is inherently biased against developers (and in favor of publishers).

Which is just weird because one situtation is wrong, the other is righyfully just, the publishers give you their money, time and expertise in return for some control and revenues (higly variated depending on contract)

And more often than not it's required for larger projects where you just cannot gather the funding, or you just want to let go of a bit of control or revenue percentage from your project.

We're more better off with comparing publishers to companies and their employees, you're going to work your entire life at a company but you're only seeing the money you get in your salary, while the company makes all profits.

Either you try to argue for a slightly better salary, or you start your own company.

[Paul Jeffries]

As you said, this is all getting a bit abstract, but I think that you can have a concept of right and wrong action without a concept of fairness.

For instance, you asked if I thought the 90/10% split was fair - well, I could take an opinion on that one way or another, but it would be purely subjective: I have no solid logical basis on which to make that decision so there wouldn't be a lot of point in my expressing it.  However, if the case was instead that the publisher was taking 100% of the profits - and doing so by taking the author's work without permission - then that is a rather different situation and I could provide a set of arguments as to why I think that would be wrong, without having to draw on a concept of fairness.

Likewise, I can't say that working a 16 hour day is intrinsically immoral - I have occasionally done so myself of my own free will.  But I could say that slavery - forcing somebody else to work for you - is immoral, even if you only do it for one hour a day.  It's really a  qualitative question and not a quantitative one.  For me, the dividing line generally comes whenever one party initiates violence, since I hold violent action to be internally inconsistant and therefore objectively wrong.  (Hence Georgism: I oppose forms of taxation such as income tax, which require the state to forcibly remove the products of people's labour, but support a tax on land use since the ownership of land is itself based on violence (i.e. the ability of the 'owner' to prevent other people from using it) rather than creation.)

Perhaps you would still call that a form of fairness - if so then fair(!) enough, I don't really want to quibble over the semantics - but to my mind it's actually a very different concept.

I wasn't using the comparison with the black prison population as a moral allegory, merely a logical one to try to show the dangers of hasty generalization.

I know of Chris Tolworthy from having played his version of the Count of Monte Cristo (which was excellent), but I didn't know he was a Georgist.  Nice to know it's not just me and the woman who invented Monopoly!

[eiyukabe]

For rent-seeking to be profitable you need to be able to maintain at least partial control over a limited resource.  What with videogames being a digital medium available from a near-infinite number of suppliers, the games industry is probably one of the worst places you could try to do this.

I don't know what you mean by "near-infinite number of suppliers" (what does near-infinite mean?), but here is my take.

The limited resource you are looking for is attention. Attention-hoarding is the new territorial-expansionism, driven by armies of market grads instead of soldiers. The channels of communication between labor and consumer are the pre-existing "land" that publishers (and most of our large capital-owners, like Zuckerberg) control to gain wealth without producing.

I mention Zuckerberg because, let's be honest -- most of the value on Facebook comes from pre-facebook relationships between people and post-facebook content added by people too naive to ask for money for it (setting up clubs and liking things and sharing photos). People could do everything they do on Facebook before facebook. I don't even think it makes things easier, I think it just shouted loud enough to draw people in and took off because of its own momentum. Now Zuckerberg is a billionaire after clamping down on social communication channels, obviously adding little value (I say "little" instead of "none" as the scripts that run Facebook took manhours to produce and are not "worthless"), and soon they will be splitting their company built on the value of others into imaginary "shares" and selling them back to the public so people can gamble in this enormous casino called the "stock market" and hope to also get rich by doing no work. What a ludicrous species we are when it comes to economics.

Regarding over-generalizing publishers: It is of course not mandatory that publishers engage in this sort of activity just like there were probably KKK members that did not hate or harm blacks, but it is a generalization I am relatively comfortable making considering the very nature of their existence.

A lot of interesting things going on in this thread, but they are convoluted by semantic sleight of hand, so I don't know how to jump in  .

Oh, I do want to say something about risk, from a stance of genuine curiosity. I feel that "risk" is not an attribute of a system, it is an attribute of a system and an agent evaluating that system (the agent's knowledge and skill). For example, if I flip a coin, you might (correctly) predict that the odds of it landing on heads are 50%. I would predict the odds to be 100% because I know it is a two headed coin. Neither of our odds are "wrong" when framed with the knowledge that we have about the system. (Of course if you believe in determinism, then any coin flip, however it lands up, was always going to land that way, which is another argument that risk only exists as a feature of an agent evaluating said system with limited knowledge).

Anyway, I don't feel like we should reward risk _in and of itself_. I mean, yeah, if a firefighter goes into a burning building to save a baby or a soldier goes to war against terrorists, they are taking great risk to do good things. But a billionaire spreading millions of dollars across companies knowing that at least one of them will be a hit because his advertising guarantees his games will be seen more than his competitions, then laying off the staffs that worked on the games that fails -- well, even if there is some sort of economic definition of "risk" as capital investment before payout, I have no respect for said individual. Especially considering that the only reason he got that much wealth was by doing the same thing to laborers before him.

[Paul Jeffries]

I don't know what you mean by "near-infinite number of suppliers" (what does near-infinite mean?)

By that I mean that absolutely anybody can set up their own website and start making and selling games and there is nothing (currently) that the established publishers could do to stop them.  For that reason it isn't rent-seeking.  I take your point about attention being limited (perhaps), but surely everybody who is trying to sell something to somebody else from multinational corporations to your local family butcher engages in this activity?  And, again - you can't stop somebody else from advertising and drawing attention to themselves, so not rent-seeking.  Now, I'm not saying that just because its not rent-seeking there isn't anything wrong with it, just that you need to come up with a different argument to convince me of that, since the situation is rather different.

Regarding over-generalizing publishers: It is of course not mandatory that publishers engage in this sort of activity just like there were probably KKK members that did not hate or harm blacks, but it is a generalization I am relatively comfortable making considering the very nature of their existence.

You mean there might be members who just turn up because they like wearing silly dresses and roasting marshmellows on the burning crosses?  Well I guess so, but since a major part of the stated goals of the KKK is white supremacy they must have at least tacit support for that aim.  That's kind of my point - I remain to be convinced that screwing over developers is part of 'the very nature of their existence' for publishers.  There are, for example, plenty of not-for-profit book publishers around.

Oh, I do want to say something about risk, from a stance of genuine curiosity. I feel that "risk" is not an attribute of a system, it is an attribute of a system and an agent evaluating that system (the agent's knowledge and skill). For example, if I flip a coin, you might (correctly) predict that the odds of it landing on heads are 50%. I would predict the odds to be 100% because I know it is a two headed coin. Neither of our odds are "wrong" when framed with the knowledge that we have about the system. (Of course if you believe in determinism, then any coin flip, however it lands up, was always going to land that way, which is another argument that risk only exists as a feature of an agent evaluating said system with limited knowledge).

You mean that risk is a matter of subjective perspective?  I absolutely agree.  But (and here's the kicker) so is value.  More on that in a second:

Anyway, I don't feel like we should reward risk _in and of itself_.

I think this nicely highlights where I differ from you (and, to be honest, 99% of the human race).  You are talking about rewarding people, meaning that they deserve a particular (in this case, financial) boon for performing 'good' actions.  Well, that's one way of looking at what a financial transaction already is - rewarding somebody for doing something that you personally consider to be 'good'.  People don't give people money for risk 'in and of itself', they do it in order to encourage people to do things which are valuable (to them) but also risky.  It's an incentive to couterbalance the disincentive of risk.

If you don't feel like that is a 'good' thing to do then you are perfectly entitled to not do it - if you ever start a business or need to borrow money then demand that your potential investors give you their money for no additional return.  Perhaps, if your cause is particularly worthy, they might actually do it.  But by using words like 'we' and 'should' you seem to be suggesting that this should be the norm - that investors 'should' accept risk without any potential reward.  Well, it doesn't seem likely that they are all going to want to do that - so what do you do?  Use force?  Take their money whether they like it or not?  And I'm sure everybody would like some effectively free money - who decides what the 'good' that this money is going to be invested in is?  You?  And where do you draw the line of 'investing' - if I go down to the fish and chip shop and buy something I am effectively investing in my future dinner, and assuming the risk that I won't like the taste.  Are you going to make all people buy all things all of the time?

This is why I don't like words like 'fairness' or 'deserve' - everybody's concept of value - of ultimate 'good' - is going to be different.  Unless you know what is objectively good (well, maybe you do) and can prove it (which I don't think is possible) you can't have any reasonable expectation for other people to do as you say and no justification for using violence to force them to do it.  You might think that a firefighter or soldier 'deserve' their money and that Mark Zuckerberg doesn't.  There are people who think that homosexuals 'deserve' to be stoned to death.  But so long as your reasons for doing so are subjective I'm not going to feel inclined to support the actual implementation of either position.

[eiyukabe]

By that I mean that absolutely anybody can set up their own website and start making and selling games and there is nothing (currently) that the established publishers could do to stop them.  For that reason it isn't rent-seeking.  I take your point about attention being limited (perhaps), but surely everybody who is trying to sell something to somebody else from multinational corporations to your local family butcher engages in this activity?  And, again - you can't stop somebody else from advertising and drawing attention to themselves, so not rent-seeking.  Now, I'm not saying that just because its not rent-seeking there isn't anything wrong with it, just that you need to come up with a different argument to convince me of that, since the situation is rather different.

I don't know that I agree with you then. The truth of the matter is that when an entity has more money to spend on advertising, and they choose to do so, that is going to gain them more sales at the expense of others competing in the market. They gain more sales by simply having money to throw at attention channels, not by improving the quality of their product (and I think we can agree that said money could go toward improving the quality of the product, so there is an opportunity cost). This works because customers can only purchase what they know about, and unless they randomly decide to search for the name of your game in google they are going to have to hear about it through some other channel (perhaps a commercial on TV or an ad on their favorite game news site). This is the limited resource that makes me think this is rent seeking, or at least unethical. That I could put up a website that no one would visit trying to sell my game does not seem to stand against the essence of the problem.

Now, is this rent seeking? I think it fits this definition from wikipedia: "The simplest definition of rent seeking is to expend resources in order to gain wealth by increasing one's share of currently existing wealth instead of trying to create wealth. Since resources are expended but no new wealth is created, the net effect of rent-seeking is to reduce total social wealth." I believe that publishers expend resources in advertising (to consumers through commercials and to developers through job ads). I believe they do this to gain wealth (profits). So far nothing wrong. However, I feel that they do not create net wealth (I will get to what I mean by wealth in a second). The developers create new wealth by making the game. The people who buy the game buy it with money that comes from the wealth they created in other industries (giving them the benefit of the doubt). Publishers simply increase the cost of getting consumers to notice your game by making you compete with their studios (an uphill battle) or join their ranks; it is really like the mafia, making you an offer you can't refuse, offering to fix the very problem they created.

Now then, I consider wealth to be that which adds to happiness. I pick "happiness" instead of "money" or "survival needs" because I think that money only represents "wealth", and that human beings "want" more than to just survive every day. In fact, with depression and suicide a real phenomenon, the argument could be made that "happiness" is necessary for survival. Anyway, I feel that game developers increase happiness by making games that people enjoy, and in return people pay for these games which allows the developers to go out and purchase things that make them happy (food and shelter to keep them alive, entertainment to keep them happy, etc). The publishing model injects middle men into this equation of equivalent exchange, suits that are providing no service to either side other than claiming the channels of attention that already implicitly exist and filtering who gets to know about what, lowering wages and increasing product prices, causing wealth to trickle into their pockets at the expense of both developer and consumer. Now maybe this isn't rent-seeking, wikipedia mentions that the term originated as a way to describe controlling production by controlling land. But it also gives examples of controlling other, abstract resources (like taxi medallions, arbitrary slots that limit how many taxis can exist in a region). So I don't know if my example of the publishing model fits this definition according to whatever authority feels it has the right to decide the extents of said definition, but I hope I have at least clarified what I see and why I think it is bad.

Also, with all due respect, I really don't feel it is worth my time to quibble over the definition of "wealth" or "value" or "capitalism" or "happiness" or "ethics" or blah blah blah. That everything is subjective up to things that society generally agrees on such as raping someone being bad is nothing new to me, and I don't particularly enjoy such side shows or find them enlightening. I'm not saying that you're doing this, just that I am scared that I am entering such a philosophical semantic tarpit based on the temperature of the thread. If you or anyone else wants to discuss what truly has value, I'm not trying to stop it just going to explain that I will bow out . Also I am saying this in response to some terms that have cropped up, but not rent seeking as I feel we honestly don't have clarity over that term (at the very least I don't, I learned it a few months ago and may be over applying it), and figuring out a common definition for that term or finding a new term to explain my fears on how the publishing industry lowers net happiness and the process they use to do that still seems fruitful to me.

[Superb Joe]

i skipped to the last page, unsure if i had posted here, and sure enough you were talking about the kkk, and burning crosses, so my work here is done

[eiyukabe]

so my work here is done

good job! 

[Paul Jeffries]

I like to think that there's a little bit of Super Joe inside all of us.  Or there was, before the restraining order.

@eiyukabe: Leaving aside the question of rent-seeking for the time being, it seems from your latest post that what you object to is not so much publishing or even investing per se - in fact has nothing to do with those activities, but instead marketing and advertisment?  Is that a fair assessment?

In which case... firstly, does this really not produce wealth?  Are adverts themselves not cultural artifacts that - even if we except your narrow definition of wealth as 'that which produces happiness' - are capable of generating enjoyment in their own right?  Certainly, people seem happy to watch trailers for upcoming games, read games magazines and so on recreationally.  At the very least, they add to people's knowledge if only to the extent that 'Game A exists'.  Imagine the case where nobody who made a game told anybody about it.  Then nobody could buy it and nobody could play it.  Does this increase net happiness?  And does not any marketing for any specific video game also increase overall awareness of games in general?

Your contention appears to be that by marketing a game, publishers gain an 'unfair' advantage over everybody else.  Well, perhaps so, but again, where do you draw the line?  If I just tell somebody about one of my games is that not making it more likely that they will go and play it, thus giving me an 'unfair advantage' with respect to that one person?  Does your complaint about game publishers not extend to absolutely everybody who engages in some form of promotion?  If not, why not?  Where is the distinction?  And what alternative do you propose?

Finally, even if I were to agree with you that this were genuinely harmful (which I don't, yet), surely the video game industry is still one of the places where this actually has least effect.  There are countless alternative routes to finding out about new games other than just from paid-for advertisments - magazines, websites, blogs, forums, youtube.  Word-of-mouth is a pretty strong force around here.  There are even, believe it or not, entire communities devoted to indie games!  There are a billion different avenues to which you might turn to promote your game which won't actually cost you a penny.  In fact, a lot of those avenues wouldn't exist without traditional games publishers buying advertising space there.  No paid-for advertising: no magazines, no (free) games review websites, no expos...

[eiyukabe]

@eiyukabe: Leaving aside the question of rent-seeking for the time being, it seems from your latest post that what you object to is not so much publishing or even investing per se - in fact has nothing to do with those activities, but instead marketing and advertisment?  Is that a fair assessment?

Perhaps, but not quite. I think marketing and advertising are just the weapons used, but it may be that that is the best "root" of evil in the publishing paradigm. Perhaps the most certain (yet vaguest) thing I can say is that I see how much power publishers have over developers, but then I see that developers are the ones actually creating the objects of value, so I believe that power structure would be reversed in any reasonable society. From that stance (and being in the mainstream game industry for five years working under three different publishers), I have seen many injustices forced on developers and consumers alike to make suits at publishers a little bit richer. Without trying to from a proper argument to convince you of anything, I will simply say that I want this to change more than anything else in life. I'm just saying these things so, even if you don't agree with me, you understand me, as that might have some value in and of itself.

In which case... firstly, does this really not produce wealth?  Are adverts themselves not cultural artifacts that - even if we except your narrow definition of wealth as 'that which produces happiness' - are capable of generating enjoyment in their own right?  Certainly, people seem happy to watch trailers for upcoming games, read games magazines and so on recreationally.  At the very least, they add to people's knowledge if only to the extent that 'Game A exists'.  Imagine the case where nobody who made a game told anybody about it.  Then nobody could buy it and nobody could play it.  Does this increase net happiness?  And does not any marketing for any specific video game also increase overall awareness of games in general?

I think a world in which no one knew about any product would be worse, yeah. But I think you can inform potential customers without bias. It's just that we have a culture of unashamed bias, possibly justified because if you don't spend this much on marketing then your competition will. I don't think it's easy to draw the line, but I do think we should try. Perhaps one solution would be to move our cultural expectations toward neutral advertising -- people with nothing at stake giving honest opinions about the product instead of advertising studios paid to say that it is the greatest thing ever made. I suppose we have that in the form of game reviews and user reviews, but sadly even these things are skewed as review sites are threatened to have advertising pulled if they give bad reviews to companies and users spam user reviews with one star ratings over the latest flash mob irritation.

Your contention appears to be that by marketing a game, publishers gain an 'unfair' advantage over everybody else.  Well, perhaps so, but again, where do you draw the line?  If I just tell somebody about one of my games is that not making it more likely that they will go and play it, thus giving me an 'unfair advantage' with respect to that one person?  Does your complaint about game publishers not extend to absolutely everybody who engages in some form of promotion?  If not, why not?  Where is the distinction?  And what alternative do you propose?

I think it's a matter of degrees and, like anything worthy of debate, hard to draw a line for. One thing that perhaps doesn't matter in your ethical framework but matters in mine is current success. If someone already has a lot of money, it just feels more wrong to me for them to take even more money from a market that someone else needs. So if you are a starving indie telling one of your friends about your game, that doesn't seem wrong to me. But if you are a large corporation who noticed that small devs are starting to make money without you through the "indie" meme and you try to butt in on that, that is unquestionably wrong to me.

And I think this is a good bridge into another view of the problem. Instead of looking at things economically, I also look at things from the typical neanderthalic/tribal mentality of dominating other human beings. I believe publishers, or more specifically the people atop publishers (and the people atop large corporations in general) have a certain psychopathic tendency to want to control others. This is why they need so much wealth, so much more than it would ever cost to feed their family and buy all the things they need. They want more wealth because that is the only way they will remain in control of people. It's not as bad as slavery, but it's the best they can do right now, and I still think it's bad. So yeah, from this perspective, I believe EA is trying to stop the underground railroad, because having developers free to succeed without them is not in their best interests. I believe you will find this pattern in many industries - union busting for example, heck even lowering wages has such a benefit of creating lower classes to rule over as paying someone just enough to eat for the month ensures they never get the resources to go create a company of their own and lets you continue controlling their destiny. Anyway, once again, just trying to clarify my perspective so even if you don't agree with me you at least understand me.

Finally, even if I were to agree with you that this were genuinely harmful (which I don't, yet), surely the video game industry is still one of the places where this actually has least effect.  There are countless alternative routes to finding out about new games other than just from paid-for advertisments - magazines, websites, blogs, forums, youtube.  Word-of-mouth is a pretty strong force around here.  There are even, believe it or not, entire communities devoted to indie games!  There are a billion different avenues to which you might turn to promote your game which won't actually cost you a penny.  In fact, a lot of those avenues wouldn't exist without traditional games publishers buying advertising space there.  No paid-for advertising: no magazines, no (free) games review websites, no expos...

"There are even, believe it or not, entire communities devoted to indie games!" --   What kind of riffraff would one find in such a community?

I don't know how to rank the game industry compared to other industries in terms of allowing the actual labor to gain from their work by leaving them opportunities, but I don't feel that said rank is as important as maximizing the potential of the game industry. That is, even if the game industry has it better than every other industry, there is still room for improvement. Anyway, the free channels unfettered by publisher dominance are what I see as under attack by something like the "EA Indie Bundle".

The reason I was using the term "rent seeking" earlier is because, though quite general, it seems like a safe way of formalizing "evil" (because when it gets down to it, I can't help but behave with emotions and a disdain for such fuzzy concepts even though I must debate with rational discourse alone and find a way to convert from one to the next). So yeah you can say advertising can be good or bad, but "rent seeking", in as much as it is defined as intentionally (this is key) seeking to gain wealth without producing equivalent wealth, seems objectively bad. And just looking at the struggle between capital and labor (in the game industry as well as in general), looking at who works the hardest versus who gets the most money, looking at how systems are gamed to ensure these patterns continue (tax havens, globalization, etc), I see nothing but great evil and oppression in our modern world fueled by the tendency to get rich off of the creation of wealth of others. I hesitate none to assume that the "EA Indie Bundle" is a cynical cash grab as EA has done little in the past decade to cause me to believe they have an ounce of compassion for anyone but their suits and shareholders. That companies have to behave with at least a pretense of aiding others (and I am not convinced they have aided indie developers in general, because who's to say that the money that goes to the EA Indie Bundle with EA getting a cut wouldn't have gone to some other Indie bundle without EA getting a cut) is a good thing compared to overt slavery, but it is not where I want our society to settle on as "good enough".

EDIT: Just wanted to add, after I got through writing this I checked my mail and had to go through tones of flyers and catalogs to get to the important bills and stuff that I was looking for (some of which got bent from all the flyers crammed on top of them). I even found an envelope that said "Time Sensitive" on it, making it sound important when in reality it was just an ad for a car dealership. So yeah, I think modern advertising is absolutely ridiculous and annoying. 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

By that I mean that absolutely anybody can set up their own website and start making and selling games and there is nothing (currently) that the established publishers could do to stop them.

this isn't exactly true. corporations can and do stop us from doing that, in a number of ways

first, games require esrb ratings to be sold in stores. only big corporations have that power, because they have lobbied to make the price of it out of the range of indies. so sure, you can sell stuff on your website, but not in a store. this is actually a really big deal, and keeps indies small and reliant on publishers

second, many operating systems have a system that warn people against downloading "unknown" .exe files -- they warn them, saying "are you sure you trust this unknown .exe file?" -- this scares many customers away, because the operating system doesn't "recognize" indie games

third, indie game developers have to pay a higher percent of taxes than game industry corporations do. EA pays basically 0% taxes, indies pay much higher rates (self-employment tax, etc.). the larger game industry corporations get special tax favors, which gives them an advantage over us

fourth, the game industry indirectly owns the game press. it's very hard for indie games to get covered in that press unless they are games with a publisher. e.g. xbla games will typically always get reviewed; xblig games typically will not, even if the xblig game is every bit as good or even better than the xbla game -- this limits the audience of indie games. even minecraft had a hard time getting reviews at first, until valve blogged about it and its popularity exploded; then the games press was forced to begrudgingly recognize it. in a very big sense, when you go with a publisher, the *primary* advantage of that is that the game press will cover you. so in exchange for a big chunk of your sales, having a publisher means the game press will review your game

fifth, there are efforts to make games that do not have esrb ratings impossible to sell *online*. joe leiberman and hillary clinton introduced a bill once to do just that, though that bill was defeated. once something like that that is passed, the days of indie game development are over

so yeah, it is true that you *can* still sell games on your website, but there are all kind of obstacles in place that have been intentionally placed there

[eiyukabe]

Those are very good points Paul that I wasn't even thinking of. I have another example that I won't go into detail here because it's recent (happened last week) and relates to my current job, but it is an example of a publisher using their power to get a platform holder to let them do something the platform holder doesn't normally let people do. In this case I think it's pretty innocuous and actually applaudable from a certain point of view (I wish I could go into detail), but I also can see corporations getting many innocuous "favors" adding up in a way that gives them unfair advantages over indies.

Something I can go into some detail about is that a friend was telling me about cases where first party platform holders were telling their company they would not be allowed to utilize features of the platform because that would compete with said company's own games. And publishers and large development studios do the same to their employees with non-compete clauses that prevent them from working on their own games at home. That my friend's company could have gone to another platform or that employees could quit working at these places if they want to work on their own projects is not satisfactory to me: It is still against free market ideals to prevent people capable of making a product as good as it can be simply based on the fact that you are in a position of power over them. And since platforms and jobs are limited and you kind of have to take some job, I feel that not everything that can legally go into a contract is ethical and can't just shrug it off as the price that one should have to pay to have a job.

[Paul Jeffries]

Eiyukabe: Thanks for that, it was interesting and I think I understand your position even if I still don't fully support it.

I'm still not terribly happy about your use of the term 'rent-seeking', since to me you're diluting something that I consider to be an objective wrong with something that I consider relatively trivial and that does not share the key characteristics that make rent-seeking an objective wrong.  But, hell, you're not the first person to do that and I don't see any profit in arguing the point further.  Such definitions are always a bit fuzzy and I suppose I can live with us using the same phrase for different concepts.

The main thing I'm curious about though is what alternative system you would propose - if you were king of the world what exactly would you change?  My concern with all of these things is that in order to 'fix' them you would have to utilize a far greater objective wrong.  I would certainly be in favor of eliminating some of the things that Paul mentions (provided they are accurate - I would like to see some supporting evidence that, for example, the cost of ESRB rating was due to lobbying and not simply due to the fact that playing and assessing these games actually takes a fair amount of time and effort - they may well all be true, but some of them do set off my tin-foil-hat alarm).  And, as a Georgist, I would obviously like to ensure that the money people were investing in things was money they had actually earned rather than merely extracted from others in the form of rent.  But it seems like this wouldn't go far enough to really address the main thrust of your concerns.  How do you ensure a lack of bias, for example?  Is true lack of bias even possible?  Or desirable?  How do you allow people to earn money, but then say 'you've got too much money, so you can't use it how you like anymore'?  How do you control the use of the word 'indie' without joining Tim Langdell in his special hell?

Subjectively speaking, I suspect I have the same emotional response to these things as you do - but I can't logically justify that response or see a valid alternative.  Personally, I'm just thankful that the indie games movement is as strong and well-regarded as it currently is and that it seems to offer a viable alternative (no matter how 'unfairly disadvantaged') to mainstream publishing.

[eiyukabe]

Eiyukabe: Thanks for that, it was interesting and I think I understand your position even if I still don't fully support it.

No problem, thank you too  

I'm still not terribly happy about your use of the term 'rent-seeking', since to me you're diluting something that I consider to be an objective wrong with something that I consider relatively trivial and that does not share the key characteristics that make rent-seeking an objective wrong.  But, hell, you're not the first person to do that and I don't see any profit in arguing the point further.  Such definitions are always a bit fuzzy and I suppose I can live with us using the same phrase for different concepts.

I would be more than happy to use another term, even a made up one, it's just that rent-seeking is the closest I've come across. Perhaps we can try reversing roles here: can you explain to me the wealth or value that publishers provide? I'm not seeking to be semantically anal, but I will likely counter any argument such as "marketing" as simply being a cure to its own disease (you need the publisher's help to market your game because marketing is expensive; marketing is expensive because publishers have driven the cost up) and not value adding. I will admit that there are services such as QA that are beneficial, though part of the reason publishers can afford such large QA staffs is because of their difference in income.

I guess basically I see this: http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//6-25-10inc-f1.jpg happening across the world and in the game industry and constantly seek answers as to why it is this way, and will pretty much on an emotional level always feel this is wrong (I don't believe the richest people work that much harder than the poorest or contribute that much more, I believe it is an elaborate self-serving interpretation of economic theory with economic jargon propogandized to the masses in ways that benefit those that are already winning the game). So, yeah, I see that income gap getting worse to the point where not only are the lower class and middle class not improving their QoL, but they begin losing it. If you've ever played Monopoly, you're probably familiar with a game set up such that he who is winning gains even more advantage to cement his victory. I fear that with this sort of cutthroat capitalism we are all going to suffer the same result, being boiled so slowly we don't feel it until it's too late and we are impoverished as low-wage slaves or simply starve as we are replaced by automated labor (well, maybe not game developers/programmers until AI really takes off, but my concerns go way beyond the game industry).

The main thing I'm curious about though is what alternative system you would propose - if you were king of the world what exactly would you change?  My concern with all of these things is that in order to 'fix' them you would have to utilize a far greater objective wrong.  I would certainly be in favor of eliminating some of the things that Paul mentions (provided they are accurate - I would like to see some supporting evidence that, for example, the cost of ESRB rating was due to lobbying and not simply due to the fact that playing and assessing these games actually takes a fair amount of time and effort - they may well all be true, but some of them do set off my tin-foil-hat alarm).

Awesome, king of the world!

I think the best types of solutions are social movements, not laws. People resent being told what to do even if they think it is the right thing to do. So with that said, I will talk about how I think certain things *should* work to be more fair, then I will mention some things that I am actually currently trying to do to fix them (with little hope that they will work, but that's what antidepressants are for ).

For starters I think we should all focus on technologies that lead to post-scarcity and life-longevity. I believe that scarcity and death are fears that make people do the dirtiest things. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that every CEO who lays off thousands of people is operating under fear of reprisal; despite having that much money, there is probably some annoying part of our brains that is wired to always wonder what will happen to us if we don't "keep up" with our equally powerful competition, and self-preservation leads the CEO to think of his employees not as human beings with similar needs (in far worse circumstances than he) but as resources to modify to minimize his fear. Projecting fear into the suits in our society today is the only way I can empathize with them; if they have the happiness that I think I would have with that much money, I don't see how they can be so heartless to constantly want more money and not care about the middle and lower class.

Oh, I would legalize marijuana, as that might calm people down too .

Now if people are calm and have their immediate needs met or see that we are moving toward that, I think this whole capitalist society can become a little less cemented. As it is now, it is only a free market in principal; the facts of having to pay bills, the ability of your current employer to set up employment contracts with non-compete clauses, the ability of your current employer to say bad things about you when your next employer calls them as a reference, the army of the unemployed that you will inevitably have to compete with -- all of these things constrain what the worker can do in terms of short term happiness and long term wealth accumulation, making the American Dream only attainable for those who already have it and very very very few individuals that outsmart the gate keepers. If we can progress in concert, hopefully we can get to a future of automated labor that helps everyone and not just the private owners of the means of production; in that case, people would be more free to do what they want as their basic needs would be taken care of.

I don't think I could use authorial power. A few simple things come to mind, such as outlawing corporate personhood and abolishing software patents, but frankly I would rather use my clout to encourage instead of enforce. I would rather spend my time talking or blogging or whatever with the followers that I have and figure out together what we can do to get a cooperative spirit than quibbling with congress or signing bills (taking a US-oriented view, I guess if I was a King I would be operating in a different government). With a competitive spirit, which we have now, no amount of laws can save us. Everyone will view a new law as a risk/reward analysis, to break if the expected value is positive with no guilt knowing that we will lose in the market to our competition who is going to break it because they know the same about us. Every person you hire is a cost, not a fellow human being to be compassionate about but a necessity to minimize as soon as you can, casting them to the abyss of poverty so you won't be cast there yourself as your competition does the same.

As a fun experiment, I would be tempted to separate the top x% and bottom x% sorted by wealth into separate nations that can trade neither capital nor labor and see which one succeeds . But I would probably avoid that temptation.

Anyway, what I'm doing now: I am contacting various people in the mainstream game industry and we are trying to get a movement started to educate developers and provide anonymous forums for whistle blowing and collective contract negotiations. I am working after work on an indie project with a couple of friends. If it somehow takes off and we become rich, we are talking about helping other indies and trying to create a spirit of cooperation instead of the bitter atmosphere of competition that you see in the community (for example, read the recent IGF thread). I would like to gain wealth so I can pass it on to other people whose dreams can only be realized if society gives them a break, under the condition that they do the same if they take off. I am actually excited about kick-starter and the kick-back program, because I feel they cut out middle men while encouraging a cooperative spirit. I am also working on a programming environment/platform, can't go into details and I don't think it will be done for several years but I am hoping to develop a community around it that is filled with this spirit of cooperation. I guess I am kind of trying to play the middle man game myself to build up clout so I can have a voice to stop the problem, all the while hoping that I don't become corrupt myself  . Also I just have some issues with just about every development environment I work with and want a better environment for my future games, so there's some selfishness there too . Finally, I am educating myself and talking on forums and blog posts about topics such as this to try to spread awareness about wolves in sheeps' clothing in this industry.

 And, as a Georgist, I would obviously like to ensure that the money people were investing in things was money they had actually earned rather than merely extracted from others in the form of rent.  But it seems like this wouldn't go far enough to really address the main thrust of your concerns.  How do you ensure a lack of bias, for example?  Is true lack of bias even possible?  Or desirable?  How do you allow people to earn money, but then say 'you've got too much money, so you can't use it how you like anymore'?  How do you control the use of the word 'indie' without joining Tim Langdell in his special hell?

Okay I just glanced at Georgism. I don't know what it is, but this jumped out at me: "but that things found in nature, most importantly land, belong equally to all." I think that human nature and communication are "found in nature", and a lot of the monopolistic or oligopolistic behavior seems to be in areas of communication (phones, internet, TV, radio, marketing). What do you think about this? It sounds like a balance between the free market of capitalism and the labor-owns-the-means-of-production of socialism, is there something there that can be beneficial? I think the key is finding some fair way to prevent channels of communication from being controlled by the elite, which optimistically is happening naturally with Twitter and Reddit. I feel that beyond informing the consumer, spending money to "win" the advertising arms race is a net loss for humanity. But the problem is that people don't look at net loss or gain (unless they're talking about the rising tide of capitalism, which I feel many people do to simply defend the current economic system because it is currently making _them_ rich), they tend to look at self-loss and self-gain. I don't know if there is any type of legislation that can "fix" social trends of selfishness, all I can think to do is to convince people who are selfish out of fear to give up that fear and join a hopefully ever-increasing brotherhood that produces for profit but does not use free market mechanics to dominate or prevent others from that same chance. That it is complicated to formalize a strategy for this future frustrates me but does not lessen the urgency I feel to try.

I am also partially expecting another revolution to arise in America if the wealth gap continues to increase; people are going to let slide the fact that their labor is making others much richer than them for only so long.

Well, if you want to talk about these things in private, just message me - I don't mind continuing here and would prefer it since others can jump in, but if this is getting too verbose for the forums I could take it offline.