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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.
It's not capitalism that prevents you from sharing the data project that you purchases for no marginal cost with others, it's intellectual property laws. Now if you get rid of those and let capitalism take it's course then you will almost certainly see less of these things invented but you're far from critiquing anything at the heart of capitalism.
What part of
makes it sound like I'm trying to strike at the heart of capitalism?
This sort of demonstrates my point about 'being allergic to the discussion', whenever you talk about this stuff people assume the old battle lines are in effect and that those must be the 'sides' we're arguing for.
Capitalism (well, free markets) is great in general, I'm just saying it doesn't deal with abundance well because it evolved to handle the distribution of scarce resources. You shouldn't expect it to handle the distribution of post-scarcity goods well, that's not a thing that even existed when it was being formed!
Like I said, capitalism's solution to post-need goods is to impose artificial scarcity; IP laws are one of the ways that this artificial scarcity gets imposed. The fact that without that imposition, capitalism can't incentivize the creation of those goods and they stop existing, is very much a part of my point: that capitalism doesn't have a good solution to this situation.
The real issue here is how to incentivize creation without artificial scarcity.
In theory, the makers of a great game don't care whether they make $50M and a million people play their game, or they make $50M and billion people play their game.
There must be some way for society to get them that $50M without telling those 999 million people they're not allowed to play it. We're not so stupid that this is physically impossible for us to accomplish.
We just have to talk about it and figure it out.
People assume this because you invoked capitalism for no gain whatsoever. As I've said elsewhere this discussion has happened before with no reference to fundamental economic systems.
It's not capitalism or markets that doesn't have a solution to this, it's a atomic property of this type of thing. There is no natural solution it's hacks and kludges all the way down.
Right, and somethings like price discrimination try to get at this but it's messy. The problem is the same mechanism we use to determine the value of the game is inherent to the scarcity. Something like a government buyout price could be interesting, a studio could opt to sell their languishing IPs straight to the state for some reasonable multiple of the cash earned to date but that's got it's own issues. Again, I'm really not opposed to tweaking the systems in play.
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