3 ms·

I'm not sure I agree with you. But I'll give you this -- that I've thought the same thing before and I'd be interested in seeing more people experiment with sys

I'm not sure I agree with you. But I'll give you this -- that I've thought the same thing before and I'd be interested in seeing more people experiment with systems around that idea. To expand on that, Kickstarter is a platform where you get people to give you money so you can make something in the future, which is... fine. But it's more of a bootstrapping platform than anything else, and it suffers from that. Kickstarter exploits people FOMO, but it's hampered by the inherent risk that the thing you're funding might never exist. I'm working on independent games right now. I haven't chosen to Kickstart them, for a lot of reasons. What I would be curious to do is to pick maybe a smaller title, completely finish it, and then put it on Kickstarter for the full amount of money I wanted to get out of it -- not just to fund it, but including my target returns. The game would be done, it would be reviewable by press, once it got funded I would just immediately put it as a free download. But I wouldn't release it until people pledged enough money to make it worth my while -- meaning not just cost of production, but revenue. In theory, exploiting FOMO but with none of the risks that the game won't be finished or that it'll turn out terrible. I've gone back and forth about the negatives there. It would be way more expensive than an average Kickstarter goal. You have to decide up-front how much money your game is going to make. And you're still fighting against the fact that fans can just say, "well, someone else should fund it." I'm not sure it's actually a feasible model in practice. But I'm really curious to see how the patron model could evolve; just not curious enough to experiment with bigger games where I need them to do well financially. I am not a copyright abolitionist. I am really interested in seeing alternative models develop, even interested enough that I might experiment in those areas in the future, but I think that there needs to be more working examples of those models before I'm willing to jump ship on copyright.

hutzlibu 7y ago
"but I think that there needs to be more working examples of those models before I'm willing to jump ship on copyright" I understand that. I am also not a fanatic in the sense, that I would fight towards a political change to abolish copyright (would be hopeless anyway with the current state of things). I just want to work and fight for more models of working alternatives. The linux and blender foundations and wikipedia are the best examples I know of. And I want to add another working example soon.
- nonbirithm 7y ago
  I'm not saying this is ideal or practical, but I thought about this when I started playing on a community-run City of Heroes server. It's an MMO which was shuttered in 2012 despite a very devoted fanbase. People had been clamoring for any chance to play the thing again for years. As an example of this devotion people were calling it a big deal when a program became available that does nothing but allow players to walk around the first hub world and chat together. It was all they could do. Then word breaks that there had been a private server running in secret the whole time based on source code that had secretly traded hands a long time ago. Then, regardless of the moral implications, someone went ahead and leaked the source code. Because of that the general public finally got to play the game for the first time in over six years. Apparently it has 100,000 registrants on the most popular server alone, which I find ridiculous for a game which has resurfaced out of nowhere with no real advertising and whose publisher never intended it to return. Imagine all the revenue they're missing out on. (Of course, it's only popular today because it was popular in 2012 when it was subscription-based.) From my limited understanding there doesn't seem to be massive feature updates like new maps or raids when Paragon was developing it. Instead there are minor quality of life perks like making the paid upgrades purchasable with in-game currency or tweaking formulas to align with the playerbase's wants. You don't even have pay for anything to keep playing individually; the server is funded by volunteers with donations. The monthly target seems to be about $5,000, most of which goes to hosting fees. Since enough interested people keep paying, the server stays up. And since the source code is now available there's nothing precluding another party from starting a different server if things go under. All to be able to keep playing the game. It goes to show that people are happy just being able to play the thing at all. There's no need for large salaries to keep developing content and justify monitization. The code is worked on by a devoted team of people with a very big passion for the former-product, and the devs and users are part of the same community. In a perfect world this is probably how an MMO could be sustained for years to come. And it's possible primarily because the source is available. Of course, the only reason any of this is possible is because the parties involved blatantly violated copyright by posting the source code and using proprietary assets like textures and music - but this doesn't matter because, for some reason, nobody cares. Yet. Maybe it's because NCSoft figures they're not competing with anyone since they were the ones to shut it down years ago so there's no harm in letting it stay open. Maybe they just got lucky NCSoft wasn't disingenuous and that they weren't slapped with a draconian takedown demand for a very popular game that would otherwise never be playable by anyone until the end of time. But for some reason, the people with the most interest in where all the development capital went just let it slide - for now. Also this differs from a lot of open source projects since it's technically illegitimate, none of the code is under an open source license, and the work being done is fairly minor. Basically everyone got a head-start by being able to reuse Paragon's code back when the people writing it were salaried and experts in this kind of thing so the complicated parts of the MMO architecture are already finished and everyone can focus on the small quality of life things.
ngold 7y ago
Another game developer here, in the same situation. I also did not Kickstarter or patreon anything as I develop my game, but when it's finished their are dozens of outlets to sell the finished version on. From the play store to steam and everything in between. Copyright should be looked at as a taxpayer funded limited time monopoly. Unfortunately that monopoly time limit has gone way past the 14 years originally intended. You could double that to 28 years with an extension. But now it's ridiculously long. Meaning the taxpayer never see a return on their monopoly investment in the form of public domain. >The Congress first exercised its copyright powers with the Copyright Act of 1790. This act granted authors the exclusive right to publish and vend "maps, charts and books" for a term of 14 years. This 14-year term was renewable for one additional 14-year term, if the author was alive at the end of the first time. With exception of the provision on maps and charts the Copyright Act of 1790 is copied almost verbatim from the Statute of Anne.[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_...

hutzlibu 7y ago

"but I think that there needs to be more working examples of those models before I'm willing to jump ship on copyright" I understand that. I am also not a fanatic in the sense, that I would fight towards a political change to abolish copyright (would be hopeless anyway with the current state of things). I just want to work and fight for more models of working alternatives. The linux and blender foundations and wikipedia are the best examples I know of. And I want to add another working example soon.

nonbirithm 7y ago
I'm not saying this is ideal or practical, but I thought about this when I started playing on a community-run City of Heroes server. It's an MMO which was shuttered in 2012 despite a very devoted fanbase. People had been clamoring for any chance to play the thing again for years. As an example of this devotion people were calling it a big deal when a program became available that does nothing but allow players to walk around the first hub world and chat together. It was all they could do. Then word breaks that there had been a private server running in secret the whole time based on source code that had secretly traded hands a long time ago. Then, regardless of the moral implications, someone went ahead and leaked the source code. Because of that the general public finally got to play the game for the first time in over six years. Apparently it has 100,000 registrants on the most popular server alone, which I find ridiculous for a game which has resurfaced out of nowhere with no real advertising and whose publisher never intended it to return. Imagine all the revenue they're missing out on. (Of course, it's only popular today because it was popular in 2012 when it was subscription-based.) From my limited understanding there doesn't seem to be massive feature updates like new maps or raids when Paragon was developing it. Instead there are minor quality of life perks like making the paid upgrades purchasable with in-game currency or tweaking formulas to align with the playerbase's wants. You don't even have pay for anything to keep playing individually; the server is funded by volunteers with donations. The monthly target seems to be about $5,000, most of which goes to hosting fees. Since enough interested people keep paying, the server stays up. And since the source code is now available there's nothing precluding another party from starting a different server if things go under. All to be able to keep playing the game. It goes to show that people are happy just being able to play the thing at all. There's no need for large salaries to keep developing content and justify monitization. The code is worked on by a devoted team of people with a very big passion for the former-product, and the devs and users are part of the same community. In a perfect world this is probably how an MMO could be sustained for years to come. And it's possible primarily because the source is available. Of course, the only reason any of this is possible is because the parties involved blatantly violated copyright by posting the source code and using proprietary assets like textures and music - but this doesn't matter because, for some reason, nobody cares. Yet. Maybe it's because NCSoft figures they're not competing with anyone since they were the ones to shut it down years ago so there's no harm in letting it stay open. Maybe they just got lucky NCSoft wasn't disingenuous and that they weren't slapped with a draconian takedown demand for a very popular game that would otherwise never be playable by anyone until the end of time. But for some reason, the people with the most interest in where all the development capital went just let it slide - for now. Also this differs from a lot of open source projects since it's technically illegitimate, none of the code is under an open source license, and the work being done is fairly minor. Basically everyone got a head-start by being able to reuse Paragon's code back when the people writing it were salaried and experts in this kind of thing so the complicated parts of the MMO architecture are already finished and everyone can focus on the small quality of life things.

ngold 7y ago

Another game developer here, in the same situation. I also did not Kickstarter or patreon anything as I develop my game, but when it's finished their are dozens of outlets to sell the finished version on. From the play store to steam and everything in between. Copyright should be looked at as a taxpayer funded limited time monopoly. Unfortunately that monopoly time limit has gone way past the 14 years originally intended. You could double that to 28 years with an extension. But now it's ridiculously long. Meaning the taxpayer never see a return on their monopoly investment in the form of public domain. >The Congress first exercised its copyright powers with the Copyright Act of 1790. This act granted authors the exclusive right to publish and vend "maps, charts and books" for a term of 14 years. This 14-year term was renewable for one additional 14-year term, if the author was alive at the end of the first time. With exception of the provision on maps and charts the Copyright Act of 1790 is copied almost verbatim from the Statute of Anne.[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_...