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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.
Right, which is why I didn't say we should just move to communism and communal property.
I said we need to come up with a new system that accounts for all these problems (the problem of financially disentangling scarce invention and abundant production, such that we can incentivize invention without relying on artificial scarcity).
And my point was that conversations about trying to come up with that new system are often derailed, because anyone who criticizes capitalism and talks about the need for a new system, tends to get tarred as a communist and ignored.
Admittedly, I could have spent more words explaining that part, I just get worried there's a maximum comment length before people start skimming.
Here is as example of a new system that almost certainly wouldn't work, but shows the types of ideas you could discuss... The government measures how much people spend on all digital entertainment products today, and creates a new tax in that amount. Anyone in the country can download and enjoy any digital entertainment they want, for free, at any time. The revenue from the tax gets split among all digital creators proportionally to how many times their product was downloaded, with some type of pro-rating for how long the experience is or how long it should take to produce or etc., details to be worked out by hypothetical domain-expert philosopher kings.
Again, lots of obvious problems with that idea, it's not the one we'd end up on. But it might still be actually better than the current system of artificial scarcity plus rampant piracy, because I think that model is really really bad, and actually deadly when we look at things like medications that cost pennies to produce and billions to invent.
(and note that these types of artificial scarcity goods also include basically all educational materials productivity software from CAD to Photoshop, industrial secrets to improve production or product quality, etc... lots of things that could be shared freely and would massively improve the world if they were, if we just came up with a way to still incentivize their creation)
Ultimately what I'm really fighting here is capitalist realism - the cognitive bias that, because capitalism is what we do have and because it works better than some other systems we have examples of, it must be the only possible system that could be functional and good. I think capitalism (well, free markets, we don't really need the separate capitalist class) is pretty great, but I don't think it's the final form of human endeavor and I don't think it's teh best we can do across every domain and in every situation no matter what. I don't think it's bad, I just have loftier ambitions.
You're describing spotify.
Pretty much, yeah, except with taxes instead of a subscription model so that every citizen can enjoy it no matter what.
(you could call taxes a subscription to citizenship, I suppose, then it's mostly the same thing)
That's kind of my point though: this isn't actually that weird or complicated of an idea. Lots of people recognize the problem and have tried various solutions (spotify, patreon, stream donations, advertising/product placement, etc). Lots of the solutions work ok, but they still have a lot of problems because they're just patches on the existing system, which is fundamentally unsuited for these situations.
I'm just saying that finding a universal solution that we can use for all post-scarcity goods (including things like medicines that cost billions to invent and pennies to produce) is really really important, and we should be focused on coming up with that solution (and not fall into capitalist realism where we reject all solutions as impossible or evil or w/e).
Spotify being a voluntary interaction makes it far superior in my opinion.
My point I think is that no such universal solution exists and this search you ask for has been ongoing for as long as this class of high upfront cost low to no marginal cost goods have existed. Capitalism, combined with some regulation, offers a lot of flexibility to tailor specific solutions to specific problems. If you want to say "Hey, we should tweak or even heavily change the regulation component to better achieve our ends" that's a totally valid thing to propose. I myself have a lot of things I'd like to tweak about how IP works in the US. But nowhere in this discussion does some adherence or aversion to 'capitalism' enter the picture.
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