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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.
I'm ready and willing to have a conversation about alternative forms of economic organization. It doesn't mean I won't criticize those ideas. I think you are wasting energy complaining about how a conversation can't be had, when you could instead just be having the conversation you claim can't be had.
I know you admit there are problems with this, but there are a class of problems that are very important to point out. Practical and implementation issues can often be ignored at first. But one thing that can't be ignored are incentive issues.
When communism first came around everyone was very focused on the technical problems. Like "what is the best way to communally run a farm in the interests of the workers". But they ignored glaring incentive problems like "who gets rewarded for well run farms, and punished for poorly run farms?"
I think your proposal has an incentives disconnect. You are vaguely trying to connect the two through downloads and other proxy measurements. I know you are reluctant to bring up communism, but I have to because this type of proposal is exactly what communist Russia went through. We have historical examples of a country trying to run industries based on some measurements of what is useful about that industry. And the problem with this type of system is so common that it gets a name: GoodHart's Law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
The other incentives disconnect is in thinking that philosopher kings exist. They don't. Real people will be involved in this system. And real people are subject to capture. What happens when the guy in charge of figuring out the measurements owes a favor to someone that would benefit from a change in how the measurements work? This kind of regulatory capture happens so often in the US government. Its not even explicitly corruption. Its just humans being humans. Former regulators get jobs at firms, and then talk with their regulator buddies still working at the regulatory body. It happened plenty in the Soviet System to the point where unless you were a well connected Communist Party insider you would get fucked over by all the other insiders changing the rules, or selectively applying the rules to benefit each other.
The best way to figure out how much someone values something is to ask them how much they want it relative to other resources. Money is a technology for accomplishing this calculation. If the "philsopher-kings" existed and were actually competent I believe they would just exactly recreate money and artificial scarcity. Would you consider the system a failure if it just exactly recreated what we currently have?
I don't think free markets work as well without ownership. I am familiar with many different kinds of economic systems. It is my area of interest and study. If there is a new idea about how economic distribution can work, I'd be very interested to hear. The vague outline of what you proposed is not new though. Its central economic planning. It is often associated with communism, but the Western "capitalist" nations experimented with it as well. It tends to fail outside of niche uses. For rather straightforward reasons, some of which I outlined above:
If you are looking for entirely new economic systems, reading Robin Hanson is your best bet. Most people I've talked with that don't like capitalism and try to come up with something else ultimately just reinvent some form of communism, socialism, or central planning. Capitalism is not the default because people like it. Almost everyone hates capitalism. Its the default because every other idea that seemed even slightly plausible has been tried, and many of them have failed horribly. Its the default because the country that sort of stuck with it and gave it some lip service, did way better than all the countries that said "lets try something else".
So let me start by saying why I do actually think it's very important to litigate whether such a discussion can be had and how it should be had. The reason being that I don't expect anyone on this forum to be the type of world-class expert who could invent an actually workable new system, nor to have the influence and following to get it implemented if they did. We can certainly discuss such thing for fun, but I wouldn't expect them to lead anywhere.
On the other hand, I do think the members of this forum (and similar ones all over the place) have slightly more collective ability to influence discussion norms and memetic patterns around these types of issues. Not much, certainly, I don't think we're going to change the world just because we decide that one type of discussion should be more legitimized and taken more seriously. But I do think we're a lot more likely to be one useful drop in that particular tidal wave of changing the discussion norms to a place needed for a solution to be found, than to be useful in the process of actually discovering and promoting the next economic model the world ends up using.
And I think your response here does somewhat demonstrate the problem with the discussion that I'm trying to call out here. Any mention of government involvement gets rounded off to central planning, any questioning of the capitalist class gets rounded off to no private property, everything gets lumped into the category of communism, the whole thing is dismissed because communism never works in practice.
I think these are in large part cached responses, which get in the way of fairly considering my (admittedly bad and poorly thought out!) proposal. I think they get in the way of discussing actual good proposals, too.
In detail:
I feel this is kind of unfair to my proposal: the proxy measure I suggest is people actually voluntarily using the thing, which is pretty much how markets work already.
I agree that you can get into Goodhart's law problems if you distribute money based on how many people use/want a thing, but I think they're pretty much the exact same problems you have in current capitalist markets; see the Marvel supremacy, and other trash popular culture.
I agree that price discovery is the best way we have to fairly distribute economic incentives and resources. The problem I'm trying to solve is how to do that without artificial scarcity.
My proposal here was that instead of using money as the scarce resource that people allocate among alternative, we use their time. Entertainment already works this way in practice: more is produced than anyone could ever consume, people decide what to spend their limited free time on. People deciding what to spend their scarce leisure time on is fairly isomorphic to people deciding what to spend their scarce money on; I think you would find the same types of price discovery in such a system.
And I don't think that's really anything like 'central planning'.
And I didn't say no private ownership of anything, I said no capitalists. This was just a parenthetical not really related to my proposal, so I'll explain more:
I think price discovery through free and competitive markets is a great piece of social technology, which I've already said we should keep in place for all scarce resources.
I don't buy that such a market system requires a separate ruling class of capitalists who own the means of production, while everyone else has to sell their labor to those people to survive.
I think you could have an equally efficient free market economy where everyone owned (individually or in partnerships) the means of production for whatever they produce, where they did not work for anyone else and their labor was not alienated, but where they still produced goods under their own direction to sell on the market.
I think the fact that we call competitive free markets (or sometimes, just any type of trading general!) 'capitalism' is basically the result of very successful propaganda efforts by the capitalists elites, intended to make us identify them personally with all our economic success. I think that's a motivated narrative that has much more to do with politics and power relations than it has to do with economics, and I don't think it's actually true.
I think free markets are the powerhouse here, and the capitalist ruling class are basically riding its coattails and not contributing much.
First of all, there was a time when feudalism was the best possible economic system, way more productive than anything else anyone had tried. We're not at the end of history yet, there's no reason to think the future can't come up with more improvements just like the past did. And I'm saying that all these appeals to past failures are slowing down that process.
Second, I'm talking about how to efficiently distribute digital goods. No kidding no countries in the 1600s or 1800s or 1950s came up with a good solution for that problem, it didn't exist at the time.
Again, this demonstrates why I think the tendency to round everything off to communism gets in the way of actually discussing the topic at hand.
This is snobbery.
As is most of what we talk about here.
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