this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
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So exactly how would non-capitalism work here? I am curious to see what kind of games we would have if there were no incentives.
One of the best video games ever made, Tetris, was made in the Soviet Union, and the guy who made it didn't see any profit from it for most of his life. Passion projects and games as art would still exist too. I don't think Stardew Valley exists because Concerned Ape thought it would make him rich - it did, but that's not why the game exists in the first place.
he did it because no one would listen to his music /s
I mean, other than that one song the music was pretty unmemorable.
You're describing markets. Capitalism is the part where people who don't even work at the game company make money off the game company.
Ideally if money wasn't a factor you'd see way more passion projects. In fact some of the most popular games in the world either are passion projects or stemmed from them. Counter-strike was a mod. Dota was a mod. PUBG was a originally DayZ: Battle Royale mod. Minecraft was originally just a passion project. Dwarf fortress is a passion project.
Overall you'd just get less games like what Fortnite is now or probably every COD game after MW, because they exist for the sole purpose of making money.
Ever heard of indie games?
Indie devs need to eat too. And they don't mind spare money to feel basic security while making games. The difference is they have more of that idealized capitalistic competition to even being noticed, so they create original games that you can remember, while AAA companies do have enough publicity they are sure some 10 mils of dumb fucks would buy a pooping simulator if it's sold by them and follows one of the ironed out formulas.
Making money isn't capitalism. A market economy isn't capitalism. You can look up the textbook definition, but to me capitalism means organizing absolutely everything around the pursuit of profit for the ownership class. Indie developers by and large aren't in it for the money; that would make no sense, because they could make better money doing something else.
Yeah. It seems to me while there's a lot of ways to take "capitalism", the moment you point out that people are taking paycuts to do gamedev there's no way capitalism applies to their motivations anymore.
Capitalism isn't the part where things cost money, it's the part where having money makes you money.
... or sometimes any of ten thousand other definitions, because it's an overused synecdoche for vast swaths of human culture.
There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.
Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around "people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride". It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the "limit" part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don't know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.