MrHoatzin

Hey kids! I am getting out of work in an hour and heading up to Austin where I will listen to Sorne at Frank's. They play at midnight. You should join me. If it is doable.

Wow, last time I thought of the guy was when I made fun of him for quitting Adventure Gamers to become a married man or something. Almost a decade later, I am married own a house and do a bunch wacky adult things my 21-year-old mind couldn't possibly comprehend, and I still think as far as arguments go "I have to grow up now" is the dumbest reason ever to leave a fun, relatively low-pressure, probably not too labor-intensive extracurricular job one is competent to perform. Dude is only 2 years older than me too. I guess we did give him a lot of shit for his lists and opinions and general JustAdventureness. He had full right to bail on the thing and be sick and tired of it. It is just the argument he used was ridiculous and condescending.

That wasn't even that long ago. :shifty:

"Loosey-goosey."

That is because they see the THING as a manufactured good—which it isn't. If they see it as a way of supporting an artist who makes the thing they like, I suspect the dynamic changes. It is no longer just the cold, efficient market at work. Still, some people are not going to care. Those people were gonna pirate whatever anyway.

There is so much dead weight in traditional management that people are perfectly content to live with, but alternative solutions are thrown out due to unverified truisms that at first ring true. Like, for example, all of this: Is the overhead really that serious a problem? Are people deciding not to open source random widgets left and right because this is a prohibitive expense that is totes not worth it? Bull. Programmers should already be documenting code in some way for internal usage. And I seriously doubt there's going to be a ridiculous mess of random garbage committed daily to require some poor slob to sift through laboriously at expense. Hell, if the community is cohesive, you can have reliable and proven members of the community doing the preliminary screening of the submitted code. If this manner of observation re scalability of complicated work is all that is at play with software development, Linux wouldn't exist, let alone continue existing for two decades with former powerhouses like MS flailing stupidly, trying to catch up. Running this kind of project is not easy. It doesn't require the same skill set that ordering people on your payroll to toggle bits does. But if you have a highly energized community of competent people excited to help, it should totally be possible to leverage to some end. I am not saying that Double Fine should throw all their files up on http://doublefine.com/have-at-it and come back when the game is done. A lot of the work will still happen in-house. Someone needs to look over all the shitty commits. But some people will be more serious than others and will approach (in their utility to DF) an extra sets of programming hands, for free. There is likely to be many of such people. I mean look at that: $1,767,440 and climbing. I bet there are programmers out there willing and excited to be able to donate quite a lot of their free time to the project. This is not something to automatically scoff at. The value of this input is not as tidy as a perfectly liquid $1,767,440 (and climbing) but that is no reason to disparage it. Again, Minecraft shows us is that people are absolutely willing to enjoy buggy games as long as they are marketed as unfinished and honest about the bugginess. The fact that "playtesting" means something different to normal people and professional testers is moot. It is a matter of education. Sure, a bunch of people will come to it, be annoyed that the beta is buggy and go away. The number of people who will stay is not going to be irrelevant enough for one to completely ignore its benefit or not entertain it to begin with. A motivated person doing something for the fun of it is always a superior choice to a surly teenager on minimum wage, falling through the same clipping error a million different ways, in the same shitty game he wouldn't play of his own volition, just for summer money or a chance at doing something more interesting related to gaming maybe in 5 years if he's lucky and able.

They don't have to give away all the assets. Just the executable bits and a small representative demo of sorts to make sure there is some sort of thing to benchmark. Giving something away at one point doesn't mean that you will never be able to charge for it. You shouldn't confuse handing out the source code with piracy. And you shouldn't bring freeware into the equation, it has nothing to do with freeware. People are going to crack your game no matter what. Prolly on the first day. You shouldn't bother trying to "solve" that. Rather than spending obscene amounts of time on ineffective DRM strategies, might as well spend that time and effort reaching out to the fan willing to give you $10K for a date. One is an excruciating and expensive losing battle (which only publishers care about), the other is a tidy little lump sum with words "I love you this much" written on it. And in that latter case, you can also be sure that people who appreciate your work will port your games to whatever wacky gadgets we'll be dragging around in ten years. If TP2K1 had the source to GRIME, we would already have widescreen support and higher poly models by now. Lucas Arts is effectively wasting money by sitting on this source code. If they released it, they could still be selling Grim Fandango—as it is, they're not. That is the bottom line! No real effort = profit. As magical and as simple as that. This kind of thing in the context of games sure as fuck hasn't been tried—but it has been a resounding success otherwise! Look at all the open source technologies that are beating the hell out of proprietary solutions. Again, look at Minecraft. That game was BASICALLY developed out in the open with crazy community support yet is not open source or anything.

They could totally end the cross platform woes and expenses if they worked with the community and opened their source at least a little. Just the guts that pull it all together. Let the fans help you port and test the shit. Fans are also super likely to keep porting stuff to every platform under the sun for the entirety of the foreseeable future. Just look at what SCUMMVM did without any help. Notch used the fans quite effectively in making Minecraft. Several times during development he just incorporated random plugins into the code, sometimes wholesale, sometimes he tweaked them a little. No reason this couldn't be done with multiplatform testing and development for another project. Their tools may even profit some from peer review. There are many ways to do this. They don't have to release any of the assets or proprietary middleware. I totes plan to proselytize at length about the insurmountable benefits to this approach if anyone over there will listen. We'll have to see what the planned community will look like. Could use some loudmouthed help in this department. EDIT—one more thing: Worst case scenario, no one helps or touches the code so DF is left doing it all themselves (which is what they would've done anyway). Best case scenario, free co-developers super excited to have the opportunity to help DF out, mountains of dedicated, free testers.

This other Giant Bomb article goes in hand with some of the business-y thoughts that have arisen in this conversation.

Personally, I funded the Mac version.

:shifty: :shifty: I think you're kidding, but I can't be sure. Are you kidding? :shifty:

Assuming they don't blow all that Kickstarted dough unwisely, every single game they sell after they're done is pure profit. Extra sales are bound to happen as there are surely gonna be people who're gonna miss getting in on the Double Kickstarter Fine Funtimes but are still curious to play the game.

You're forgetting that marketing is not a concern where marketing can easily be 60% of the budget, esp. for a wee game. And who cares about profit when there is no investor? They're gonna cover all expenses and salaries and walk away happy. Basically, I would expect games under this model to sell for a lot less money than a game that also has to worry about marketing and investors.

It is probably far more simple than you think. It might be as simple as creating an ad-hoc corporation. Corporations are essentially groups of random people polling their money for some goal. Corporations, as a legal widget, were initially set up to handle large public works like bridges and municipal buildings and stuff, but they at some point got appropriated into simple profit creating vehicles. There is no reason one couldn't set up a corporation whose goal is breaking even or making a very small profit. However, I don't think this is a good model for more experimental games as it is ultimately going to favor safe bets as much as publishers currently do. Unless the corporation is formed with a specific goal in mind and all the shareholders are on the same page. Which can be done.

Americans, as individuals and businesses, generally tend to assume everything is a manufactured good. Truly creative endeavors are really difficult to make work in a market economy, and especially when there are investors to take care of. The fact that the scarcity is artificial in the digital context (creating new instance of a game to sell is a trivial venture) is what makes entrenched content creators so reactionary and fascist in fighting against new technologies that poke holes in this artifice. A different model is needed. Something less antagonistic to the creative process. At this point it totally doesn't matter if Double Fine releases the entire source to their game when they're done. The actual bits are no longer a scary black hole of investment which needs to be very carefully leveraged so as to not lose someone's money. Now they become an artifact of a creative process that is completely paid for. People who aggressively threw their money*at Double Fine didn't pay for a product. They paid for a lot more. They got a kick out of the very opportunity to support something they believed in and wanted to support. All of us here, we've been whining about adventure games for TEN PLUS FUCKING YEARS! Finally we get to rub current marketplace realities and underlying economic conditions in the face of the managers manning the gates of our culture—and do so in a real, tangible way! I didn't really realize the full potential of this kind of patronage until I felt myself wondering if I wanted to give Double Fine $100 or $250. I would never actually pay that much money for a game. Let alone a sight unseen game! I haven't even purchased any of the recent games they've made because all I have is a bunch of ancient PCs, a couple of Macs and a PS2—but I would've totally given them a similar sum of money for making those games, even probably the ones I don't care to play. But BECAUSE these things are presented as manufactured goods rather than opportunities to support something I believe in, I didn't buy them, since I reasoned I didn't need them and couldn't use them. The questions that cynics ask of pay-what-you-like funding models assume all customers approach these things with cold rational calculation—but when the object of the customer's support is something that he or she is very passionate about—the game fucking changes. It is not the same fucking game goddamnit. Anyway, I bet Schafer is overjoyed that he doesn't have to be the resident publisher-ass-kisser for once and gets to make a game.

Yup. He is somehow the only other person I notice with a Jake avatar. His is on Twitter.

Every time I see a post of yours I think it's Marek.

What is really awesome about this is that they have no incentive to spend ANY of that money on advertizing. :tup:

I played through sorne.com's only album House of Stone (a great Austin artist, staggeringly unknown for his awesomeness; Sal Limones and myself will be checking him out on the 17th of February at Frank's, if any of the Austin folk wants to join us) and then through the whole of . Glad you liked it.

Well that was fun!

Buy used. Best kind of recycling.

Wow, way to bring a thread from the dark beyond.

This looks super slick for a HTML thing! Did you build the whole thing yourself?

/me checks tag cloud… Hmm. Does Tanu still not get it? I would've expected Tanu to have gotten it by now.

You're doing well. This is really between them, kinda, you have nothing to do with it, kinda. Go with the flow and try not to fuck yourself over. Is the dude, yer friend, very much in the wrong here? Is he sorry, or is he being a whiny bitch who refuses to admit that he did anything wrong? Does he really care about either lady? Maybe it might be a good idea to pick a side? Speak truth to power? I dunno. What do others think? Sal?