Financial alternatives

I see a lots of people complaining about how greedy and distorted the vidya business model came to be, and lots of people comment on hypothetical alternatives, I wanted to bring all of 'em from your head to this thread and see if we can find sustainable models to a decaying industry and hopefully stop depending on dubious enterprises like steam.

Here some alternatives know, share some opinions.

>almost direct selling with no drm (like humble widget for example)

Besides these, would you have any other suggestion for less greedy vydia commerce? Share your thoughts.

Why is that a hard thing to do?

Kill AAA development, make smaller,

Kill the Jews.
Eliminate fractional reserve banking.
Reduce copyrights to 5 years.
Leave everything else as is.

pretty much this, you've already fucked up if you're only doing it for profit inorder to be your own boss or some shit

If you want an honest answer, most people these days when they get together they either are making a game jam or some meme free shit that they made just for fun, practice, similars or they are making a medium-to-big game which takes lots of effort and time, they probably want this work to pay off so they'll seek whatever gives 'em most chance of getting all the investment back AND the possible profit, that means using steam, pandering to journos for coverage, DLC, early access, you name it.

I don't disagree with you thought, I mean if I had talented friends I would probably want to do that, but you see I'm a idealistic motherfucker and minecraft success is "the planets are aligning" rarity tier event, I have to acknowledge that.

by commission.

How that works?

minecraft become successful because notch used Holla Forums as a stepping stone via shilling his shit here then fucking off once he was popular somewhere else, much like yandere dev did and pretty much every dev that's come here has done

Go back to PS2 era AA games. A decent team allowed to take creative control and make what they want because it's a lower budget.
Bam lots of good games.

Imagine instead of spending your paycheck on video games, you spent your paycheck on assets for video games.

Over the course of a couple years you could have a complete video game that you could sell if you had baseline programming knowledge to plug it all in.

Or you could just pay someone to do it. You're only limited by your money and ability to find people who will work in your price range

ONE GUY

Protip: That one man army was already an expert at one aspect of game creation.

Don't try to one man army if you don't have one expert skill that you can lean on heavily.

I tired the one man army route while trying to learn everything from scratch and failed miserably.

Of course there were other things going on in my life that contributed to it, but those excuses will never make my dream game real.

What do they eat while making the game? Where do they sleep when they're not programming the game? Carmack did note that you can do anything if you have enough pizza in the fridge to last you through to the end of the project, but you'd have to bootstrap it yourself. To do that, you would need to get money to have enough to live off while making your game. The initial investment of time does come at the risk of making 0 money. Shit costs money, and the chinks are driving down labour costs. You get payed less, and shit costs more. You would need enough money still saved to live off if your game flops.

Patreon and Kickstarter were one of the best ideas that can be salvaged if reworked.

the reddit spacing is real

If you are talking about the consumer, it looks a little impractical, if you are talking about the dev, well, lots of people do that and I don't see how that would help making a better business model, I mean you could that and sell on steam and early access anyway. And lots of people actually do that.

Could you elaborate?

this is why you failed


mockingnodevs.int

reddit spacing is a stupid meme. I spaced like this back in the 4chan days because faggots would TLDR you if you typed anything that resembled a paragraph.

And I'm getting fucking tired of typing that explanation.


Oh I don't know about better. It's just an alternative. I don't think there is a better way. Making video games is hardcore, and will never stop being hardcore.

you mean your 4chan/reddit days

Patreon model is the fucking worst though


It's not worth it my man
Don't do patreon
or make it release based
But no one will give you any money on release base so enjoy that

THIS THREAD WAS STARTED BY LEFTYPOL, THEY HAVE THE THREAD UP THERE RIGHT NOW

Just an FYI, faggots. Carry on.

I don't even browse Holla Forums, nigger.

Fuck off.

Disgraceful. Even Hitler was outspoken against the dangers of greed. Greed knows no political faction, it is a sin all the same and one of the oldest committed.

This is actually a thing already, though so far it's mostly porn/flash games that are commissioned.

I can't find this thread on there but it's in the right vain

Greed is natural, if it weren't for greedy apes, man would be herbivorous, dumb, and serve as cattle to some great predator. We expanded beyond what a mere ape could do, and none matched our ancestors' might. Without greed, without the drive for more, the desire for excess, the lust for empire, man is nothing.

sauce on pic?

the thread isn't about being against greed, it's about "haha I want to use video games to make money but it's so hard to get in, pls spoon feed me on different ways"

Make it unacceptable to release a video game without also releasing the source code under a copyleft or permissive software license. The assets may still be proprietary, but anyone may go through the game's source to mod it or fix bugs. This also helps smaller developers, who now have more options and reference points aside from the Unreal/Unity/GameMaker trinity and old id Tech engines.
Games would probably be released in a better state too, as the only thing worse than releasing a game that runs like shit is also releasing the source code that shows everyone how bad you fucked up basic shit.

Leave it to leftypol to choose a kike artist.

Game development teams need to be smaller.
We basically have AAA studios and indies, and a few companies inbetween.

Those inbetween companies are the ones that make consistently good games (Larian Studios, Haemimont Games, TaleWorlds Entertainment, etc.).

The cost of game development/publishing somehow needs to go down. Once we have that, we have more entrants in the industry that can actually grow beyond a small group of friends, because at the moment we have a very open and friendly ecosystem for indies but there is no vertical progression.

Greed is bad when libtards like you do it, it's perfectly fine when aryans do it.

Wasn't there someone who worked for EA, made a hundred or so 3D models for ME3 but only got one pair of shoes in the final product? I think giant team sizes aren't nearly as bad as just throwing away thousands of hours of work.

nice dubs but hitler was a filthy commie

This is what I do, I don't pay for videogames and spend any money that I would use to buy videogames on patreons of FOSS devs.

Also
mein nieger

the best solution would be a return to the AA model of game development of the PS1/2 era.
Crank out numerous experimental but refined titles and gauge actual interest in new ideas in an economic environment that can actually brook a failure or two instead of homogenizing the industry by imitating a proven successful formula only to fail because everyone's already playing the shit you're aping

Desura tried doing that and fucked up terribly, although the problem was more with the companies running it than the FOSS client itself. Having any sort of storefront demands at least some quality control and it would almost be better if devs could host and sell the games themselves rather than relying on a middleman store.
Physical distribution could make a comeback too if devs make that shit worth buying.

You'd think that'd be a more viable strategy specially in the age of twitch where random shit hits it big because it's got one quirky gameplay element.

Well my idea of a digital distribution platform already exists and doesn't involve selling anything, it'd just be package managers like aptitude. If I want to pay money for a program then I'll donate to the developers (and generally more than what they'd normally charge if I like it).

If the game is going to be open source then they can't be proprietary which means you shouldn't rely on people "buying" them.

Sell a good game at a fair price, charge for expansions but don't jew on DLC. Over time your reputation will build up to the point you don't even have to spend much on marketing. This is the Croteam model, the AA middle ground when you're still in it for money but you also make games you enjoy.

Bingo. Most of the problems we see with games are due overall problems with the free market being choked to death.

Think of games like Battlefront that could be alive with so many updates by fans. Companies would be invest to work hard on a game and IP that could be their baby for five years then move on to other shit knowing they can't keep milking because the new IP is how they make money not milking there current one. It sad really to realize most art should be in the wild for the fans to mess with not the other way…. maybe some day.