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> possibly through tax credits or other benefits for depositing source code or playable copies with national archives. How would that work in practice? You cou

> possibly through tax credits or other benefits for depositing source code or playable copies with national archives. How would that work in practice? You could play your game yesterday, but you can't play it tomorrow because the company shut off the servers. But fear not because your tax dollars paid for the executables to be deposited in an archive Ark of the Covenant style. That might be satisfying with an oil painting. But games are meant to be played with. Can one check it out and run it? Can one modify the game to keep it running on new hardware or operating system? Can one re-distribute those modifications to others? Can one pay for someone else to run the servers for them?

rickdeckard 2y ago
As much as I would like the outcome, I doubt that this is meaningful use of tax-money in general. I also wouldn't want taxes to be invested to preserve every oil-painting ever painted by someone, as it would inevitably create an industry that creates oil-paintings for the sole purpose of tax-benefits...
- cryptonym 2y ago
  If we are going in the details, maybe tax credit should be over a small fraction of benefits for that game. You'd only get back a bit of what you paid.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    The problem is that you can barely reach consensus that tax-money is spent on elderly homes and child-care, as the a critical mass of your taxpayers are not yet old and don't have children. Once you try to establish that tax-payers money is being spent to preserve art, you inevitably cause a unsolvable political discussion on what art actually is. At best, the budget will be drained uncontrollably with the system being abused by players gaming the system, at worst the ruling political party will define what art is and only provide funding for the most boring forms of art. - To be a bit constructive: Instead of a dedicated credit/payout, it would make more sense to establish a mandate in a region (i.e. US, EU) that public funding or tax-credits for ANY company can only be made on the premise that the output created by the company becomes partially owned by the public (and the citizens of this region), which requires it to provide value even without the company's involvement. This would apply for any form of financial incentive given to company offices in a region, regardless whether it's hardware, software or services. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that ever being properly mandated/executed...
- xerox13ster 2y ago
  Oh no! a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror... You’re right, they should do something productive with their time.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    Okay, I know this is just meant to be twitter-style bullying, but I'll bite: As I wouldn't want every local governmental authority to freely define what constitutes "art", it means that everything can be categorized as art. So the most economic and democratic solution then is to close the whole circle and reduce tax for everyone in return of submitting "art", even if it's just a picture of a milk-carton in a corner. However, the consequence would be excessive governmental cost for the Ministry of Culture and Arts to preserve every piece of contributed art, so every citizen can see every art created by every other citizen. This of course would have to be funded by tax-money, which unfortunately means increased tax-burden for everyone... Result: A development put in motion which will definitely not end up prioritizing people being paid to create art!
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror... You misunderstand. Creating art is hard. Putting oil paint on a canvas is easy. So if you pay money for paint on canvas without any other checks you will get the simplest passable form of paint on canvas. If you don't mandate that the whole canvas is covered all you will get is a pile of canvas with a single brush stroke. Look up the concept perverse incentive, or cobra effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
cryptonym 2y ago
We already got plenty of game archives / abandonware stuff with VM, emulators or other compatibility solutions. There is no hard blocker except will to allow this broadly. If there is a tax credit, editors might think about this from the beginning, for newer games. For sure you can always find exceptions and loophole, just like an expert can probably find issues around oil paintings preservation.

rickdeckard 2y ago

As much as I would like the outcome, I doubt that this is meaningful use of tax-money in general. I also wouldn't want taxes to be invested to preserve every oil-painting ever painted by someone, as it would inevitably create an industry that creates oil-paintings for the sole purpose of tax-benefits...

cryptonym 2y ago
If we are going in the details, maybe tax credit should be over a small fraction of benefits for that game. You'd only get back a bit of what you paid.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  The problem is that you can barely reach consensus that tax-money is spent on elderly homes and child-care, as the a critical mass of your taxpayers are not yet old and don't have children. Once you try to establish that tax-payers money is being spent to preserve art, you inevitably cause a unsolvable political discussion on what art actually is. At best, the budget will be drained uncontrollably with the system being abused by players gaming the system, at worst the ruling political party will define what art is and only provide funding for the most boring forms of art. - To be a bit constructive: Instead of a dedicated credit/payout, it would make more sense to establish a mandate in a region (i.e. US, EU) that public funding or tax-credits for ANY company can only be made on the premise that the output created by the company becomes partially owned by the public (and the citizens of this region), which requires it to provide value even without the company's involvement. This would apply for any form of financial incentive given to company offices in a region, regardless whether it's hardware, software or services. But I wouldn't hold my breath on that ever being properly mandated/executed...
xerox13ster 2y ago
Oh no! a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror... You’re right, they should do something productive with their time.
- rickdeckard 2y ago
  Okay, I know this is just meant to be twitter-style bullying, but I'll bite: As I wouldn't want every local governmental authority to freely define what constitutes "art", it means that everything can be categorized as art. So the most economic and democratic solution then is to close the whole circle and reduce tax for everyone in return of submitting "art", even if it's just a picture of a milk-carton in a corner. However, the consequence would be excessive governmental cost for the Ministry of Culture and Arts to preserve every piece of contributed art, so every citizen can see every art created by every other citizen. This of course would have to be funded by tax-money, which unfortunately means increased tax-burden for everyone... Result: A development put in motion which will definitely not end up prioritizing people being paid to create art!
- krisoft 2y ago
  > a world which prioritizes people being paid to create art! The horror... You misunderstand. Creating art is hard. Putting oil paint on a canvas is easy. So if you pay money for paint on canvas without any other checks you will get the simplest passable form of paint on canvas. If you don't mandate that the whole canvas is covered all you will get is a pile of canvas with a single brush stroke. Look up the concept perverse incentive, or cobra effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

cryptonym 2y ago

We already got plenty of game archives / abandonware stuff with VM, emulators or other compatibility solutions. There is no hard blocker except will to allow this broadly. If there is a tax credit, editors might think about this from the beginning, for newer games. For sure you can always find exceptions and loophole, just like an expert can probably find issues around oil paintings preservation.