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Fresh controversial gaming news.
If you're not familiar with Unity, it's one of the more popular game engines in use today, especially for Indy developers. It's frequently recommended for it's relative ease of use, and up until now, generous licensing. Even if you're a very casual gamer, you've probably played some games built on this platform like Pokemon Go, Beat Saber, or Monument Valley.
Today, Unity has announced some significant pricing changes. Most controversial seems to be that beyond a certain revenue and install threshold, developers will be paying Unity per install of their game. As in, if you uninstall and reinstall the game, the dev gets charged twice.
This has managed to piss off the usual suspects of game developers, games journalists, and gamers. Many an angry comment written by Dorito stained keyboards are flooding messageboards and twitter about how this is the death of gaming. (Tongue-in-cheek by the way, as a non-game developer I find the pricing model half-baked.)
But what's really interesting is the potential for misuse that I predict will occur for the next controversial game. While Unity has said they'll try to limit malicious behavior, they're providing gamers with the ability to charge developers money by essentially clicking the uninstall/reinstall button.
Any predictions for how quickly we see the first weaponization of this tool?
What is the culture war angle to this?
Whenever topics of digital business models come up, my default culture war angle is:
This is just a further demonstration that capitalism as currently practiced is not a viable economic method for humanities far future, because it relies on scarcity to set prices through supply and demand, and actual abundance causes it to short circuit in ways that create all kinds of stupid schemes designed to produce and defend artificial scarcity.
Capitalism should remain our default for things that are actually necessarily scarce, but as we increase productivity and move to digital realms that will cover less and less of what we care about day-to-day, so we have to actually come up with an alternate method for handling the creation and distribution of those types of goods.
And we need to not be allergic to that discussion just because 'that's communism and communism killed a trillion people' or w/e.
Sound like you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Private ownership and free markets are great, and they work just fine in digital spaces.
The important part of those institutions is that they encourage useful forms of production (its not that there is zero waste in production, but of all the economic systems that have been tried, capitalism seems to kick ass at efficient allocation of scarce resources). And even though digital goods have very low or nearly zero marginal cost for production, that is not their total cost of production. If producers aren't getting paid for total cost of production than they aren't making things.
Communism gets labelled as killing a bunch of people, mainly because it was such a crappy economic system. I'm not sure if Stalin or Mao entirely meant to kill tens of millions of their own people. But the lack of productivity from their farming systems meant that was not enough food to feed everyone.
The problem with turning digital assets into communal property is you'd likely kill a bunch of incentives to create digital goods. And yes, right now there are plenty of open source projects where skilled developers contribute to projects for no monetary incentives. BUT many of these developers also have jobs at the companies that do sell software. The existence of a bunch of people with engineering and programming skills is probably directly attributable to the fact that a bunch of companies pay top dollar for this skillset. And they pay top dollar, because they can make top dollar on selling the products.
If you kill the incentive to make software products, you kill the companies that hire lots of developers, that kills the incentive to train and create new developers, that kills the open source software movement. We could probably coast for a generation on current levels of talent. But it would absolutely start falling apart. Especially all the boring software projects that make gobs of money but no one actually enjoys doing.
Incentives can exist jn the world without copyright. People written books, created songs and plays before it after all. Internet allows for even more ways to fund your project while making final product free to download, Patreon and Kickstarter devs make a living this way already. You don't need to be a communist to be against intellectual property.
They make a living partly or entirely because there is some level of intellectual property protection. Pirating exists, but it is mostly done on an individual level in the Western World. In third world countries copyright infringement is often on an industrial scale. A lot of successful patreons gate their content, without copyright protection that gating would last all of a few minutes before someone scrapes their new content and posts it elsewhere.
I find it weird to be on the side of defending intellectual property as a thing. I have lots of reservations about it, and I think there is a decent chance I'd be willing to take the tradeoffs with killing off intellectual property as a thing. But I don't ever deny those tradeoffs. Far less art is going to be produced. On the margin some forms of art and artistry that were supported by moneymaking will be almost entirely gone.
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