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“We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore." This is utterly and painfully familiar to me. Before I dove

by jarcane 12y ago

“We love your music,” the public seems to be saying, “but we aren’t going to pay for it anymore." This is utterly and painfully familiar to me. Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop roleplaying author. Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self-published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self-published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too much money or just stop responding to my emails. And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live, people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing. You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes, which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales. It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time. What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.) Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell you how amazing your thing is. Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.

eropple 12y ago
All of this, end to end. We're seeing the same subsistence-level "success" phenomenon in video games now, though. The giants make money, the occasional odd hit turns into something, and everybody else had better be happy with selling too few copies to pay your staff at $3 a pop during a Steam sale, because paying $5 is Just Too Much, Ha Ha Ha. I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution. In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.
- jarcane 12y ago
  In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. Indeed. I think the problem of artist market value isn't supply, but that people have this idea that creating something is somehow 'free,' that creative work involves no actual work and therefore should just magically fall from one's arse. "Fun" doesn't put food on the table. And creative work is incredibly labor intensive, perhaps more so than any other job I've done, from factory labor to line cook. Because it never ends. When my shift was over at a 9-to-5, that was it, but as a creator? It never switches off; you constantly have to be revising, creating, brainstorming, and promoting to have any shot at making it. One of the only guys I knew who was actually making enough off RPGs to call it a living was working 40-60 hours a week on top of a day job in (I think) insurance. Another guy I know who manages to eke by does it by writing sometimes as much as 10k words or more a day for as many as two to three different books at a time plus freelance work (by comparison, Neil Gaiman, best-selling fiction author, recently wrote that he considered 2k to be a very good day). When I was still writing I generally had to make about 2.5k to 3k a day to keep up with any kind of profitable deadline, and all for books that at best were likely to make a few grand in the full life of product. And then everyone wonders why people quit the market ...
dnautics 12y ago
> Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. What is the alternative for 'begging'? That's a loaded term for what could be considered 'advertising' or 'self-promotion' instead. Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? Where, then, would be the accountability that what they do is actually valuable to someone? Would you rather art be funded through a government grant system, where people are "begging" and dissembling and using political connections to get their money? Don't confuse value with price. The price is zero because the supply is incredibly high. Partly because the tools have been democratized; it's easy to pick up a guitar and start playing, or a digital camera and start snapping pictures.
- waterlesscloud 12y ago
  I think if you want something an artists produces, you should be willing to pay for it. If it's not worth paying for, so be it. Just don't take it anyway. That's all artists want. It's not the least bit unreasonable of them.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? No, I just suppose that artists are entitled to us paying their asking price for what they offer -- or not getting it at all, if you can't be bothered with paying. Or, to put it in another way, it's the consumer that is NOT entitled to free art when that art is put up on sale by its creators.
  - anon4 12y ago
    But if the consumer can't choose their price, then the market can't work. Usually you have choice between nearly-equivalent alternatives at different prices with more or less bells-and-whistles. But with art, a nearly-equivalent alternative violates copyright, so you can't choose a cheaper alternative, because there isn't one. Because everybody else is banned from selling one. The answer can't be anarchy obviously, but it also can't be installing spyware on every device to stop copying. The larger public has shown that they're absolutely willing to throw every single artist under the bus in order to free themselves from the shackles of copyright. The intersection of art and business is somewhat really weird. You're making something whose entire reason for existing is making people feel nice in some way, but it's never an actual physical product like a bar of chocolate. It's an experience. Depending on who you ask, that is either the most important product of civilization, or some useless baggage tying up useful hands. You need to make the former group pay you money. Fortunately, people understand that things cost money and should be willing to pay you a reasonable price. Unfortunately, most middle-class and above people fall in the latter camp, so most of your fans will be poor and for them a reasonable price might be less than what you want to get. Personally, I have never paid more than twenty bucks for a game.
guscost 12y ago
Absoutely. I've published a small game experiment for iOS and didn't expect many purchases after bumping the price up to 99 cents, but the drop-off at even that price point is remarkable. If Apple ever sent me a check I didn't notice it. Acquaintances would say "wow, cool!" and then not decide to spend a dollar and try it out. It seems that an enormous amount of self-promotion would be required to make better results likely. The market clearly does not favor this kind of product, but the amazing thing is how often I still hear about friends wanting to get into selling software or games to consumers. I always tell them to consider getting into the enterprise market instead, which is comparatively boring but has a reasonable chance of providing non-trivial income. Say what you will about corporations, but they actually pay for software. My advice to anyone with similar options is to sell software to businesses and maybe hardware to consumers. This effectively rules out most entertainment products. Some people are not discouraged by that, but those people will almost certainly be working day jobs for the foreseeable future anyway. I'm lucky to have enough free time and money where continuing work on these projects is possible without compromising on quality of life, but the odds are they will never be a primary source of income and I'm OK with that.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  Oh, the entitlement. You simply didn't create something engaging enough. Popular games make a lot of money. Take Minecraft - it was created by one guy and made hundreds of millions of dollars before he actually turned it over to a team. Whining about models and price schemes and markets is pointless. If you want to make money, you have to create something people are willing to pay for.
  - tree_of_item 12y ago
    Notch made a good game, sure, but Minecraft basically won the lottery. It's not a good example of anything. There are lots of other great games that fall victim to the phenomena described by guscost.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    When discussing the mobile market, and especially the iOS mobile market, we are talking about a consumer who typically thinks nothing of dropping $4.50 for a 12 oz. cup of badly roasted espresso with steamed milk. That they don't want to pay $0.99 for something they think is "really neat" and arguably longer lasting than a cup of "cappuccino" says more about their (consumers') sense of entitlement than the value of the products under discussion.
ForHackernews 12y ago
I don't see why this is so weird. Usually, people do things they enjoy for free, and if you want them to do something unpleasant, then you have to pay them to do it. Artists are essentially asking to get paid to do something they enjoy (for some value of "enjoy"). That's a nice gig if you can get it, but I can see why it would be a hard sell to consumers.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  It's weird because how I feel about my work has absolutely nothing to do with its market value. Zero. I work for money. If you want to experience my work, you'll pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't get to see it. My enjoyment in creating the work is the same whether or not you pay for it. Your enjoyment is what you're paying for. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, it's your loss. This is equally true of my work as a scientist, as a software engineer, as a poet (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) and as a novelist (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418500862&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...). The market value of what I create (science: moderate, software: very high, poetry: almost zero, novel: barely more than almost zero) has nothing at all to do with my enjoyment of the act of creation, which is extremely high in all cases. Some of my work I do for free for various reasons of my own, but mostly you have to pay for it if you want to have it, and I get to say that because it's my work. I own it. I made it. I created it. I'm an arrogant prick and if you don't like that... too bad. Go rip off someone else's work. I'm making good money from the stuff people are willing to pay for, and having lots of fun with everything I do, and so the loss is all on the side of those who can't appreciate the value of my other work. If you think you deserve the output of my creativity without paying me simply because I enjoy the act of creation, the problem is all on your side.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    You seem really defensive about this. Presumably some employer pays you to do your work as a scientist and a software engineer, and in the absence of that incentive, you would not do identical work.
mkramlich 12y ago
I've been playing and designing games of several kinds since childhood, including dabbling in tabletop RPG writing/design. So I hear you. I'd love to know if your experience was with your own original RPG or did you just work on adventures/expansions for other systems (D&D, etc)? I once took a shot at writing and publishing a GURPS compatible adventure, independently, and gave up because SJG either forebade it or simply made it too annoying. And that was the "final straw" beyond already knowing that my total hourly ROI for the project almost certainly would have been bad. Far too bad for a craft that takes such a rare and above-average set of intellectual skills. However I was "lucky" also to have been programming since childhood, and that is one field that historically does pay well for one's time.

by jarcane 12y ago

eropple 12y ago

All of this, end to end. We're seeing the same subsistence-level "success" phenomenon in video games now, though. The giants make money, the occasional odd hit turns into something, and everybody else had better be happy with selling too few copies to pay your staff at $3 a pop during a Steam sale, because paying $5 is Just Too Much, Ha Ha Ha. I guess we could all go make free to play games that are designed to exploit consumers and get them on an addiction treadmill. Because that's ethical.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution. In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.

jarcane 12y ago
In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers. Indeed. I think the problem of artist market value isn't supply, but that people have this idea that creating something is somehow 'free,' that creative work involves no actual work and therefore should just magically fall from one's arse. "Fun" doesn't put food on the table. And creative work is incredibly labor intensive, perhaps more so than any other job I've done, from factory labor to line cook. Because it never ends. When my shift was over at a 9-to-5, that was it, but as a creator? It never switches off; you constantly have to be revising, creating, brainstorming, and promoting to have any shot at making it. One of the only guys I knew who was actually making enough off RPGs to call it a living was working 40-60 hours a week on top of a day job in (I think) insurance. Another guy I know who manages to eke by does it by writing sometimes as much as 10k words or more a day for as many as two to three different books at a time plus freelance work (by comparison, Neil Gaiman, best-selling fiction author, recently wrote that he considered 2k to be a very good day). When I was still writing I generally had to make about 2.5k to 3k a day to keep up with any kind of profitable deadline, and all for books that at best were likely to make a few grand in the full life of product. And then everyone wonders why people quit the market ...

dnautics 12y ago

> Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero. What is the alternative for 'begging'? That's a loaded term for what could be considered 'advertising' or 'self-promotion' instead. Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? Where, then, would be the accountability that what they do is actually valuable to someone? Would you rather art be funded through a government grant system, where people are "begging" and dissembling and using political connections to get their money? Don't confuse value with price. The price is zero because the supply is incredibly high. Partly because the tools have been democratized; it's easy to pick up a guitar and start playing, or a digital camera and start snapping pictures.

waterlesscloud 12y ago
I think if you want something an artists produces, you should be willing to pay for it. If it's not worth paying for, so be it. Just don't take it anyway. That's all artists want. It's not the least bit unreasonable of them.
coldtea 12y ago
>Do you suppose artists are entitled to cash that falls out of the sky proportional to the effort they put it? No, I just suppose that artists are entitled to us paying their asking price for what they offer -- or not getting it at all, if you can't be bothered with paying. Or, to put it in another way, it's the consumer that is NOT entitled to free art when that art is put up on sale by its creators.
- anon4 12y ago
  But if the consumer can't choose their price, then the market can't work. Usually you have choice between nearly-equivalent alternatives at different prices with more or less bells-and-whistles. But with art, a nearly-equivalent alternative violates copyright, so you can't choose a cheaper alternative, because there isn't one. Because everybody else is banned from selling one. The answer can't be anarchy obviously, but it also can't be installing spyware on every device to stop copying. The larger public has shown that they're absolutely willing to throw every single artist under the bus in order to free themselves from the shackles of copyright. The intersection of art and business is somewhat really weird. You're making something whose entire reason for existing is making people feel nice in some way, but it's never an actual physical product like a bar of chocolate. It's an experience. Depending on who you ask, that is either the most important product of civilization, or some useless baggage tying up useful hands. You need to make the former group pay you money. Fortunately, people understand that things cost money and should be willing to pay you a reasonable price. Unfortunately, most middle-class and above people fall in the latter camp, so most of your fans will be poor and for them a reasonable price might be less than what you want to get. Personally, I have never paid more than twenty bucks for a game.

guscost 12y ago

Absoutely. I've published a small game experiment for iOS and didn't expect many purchases after bumping the price up to 99 cents, but the drop-off at even that price point is remarkable. If Apple ever sent me a check I didn't notice it. Acquaintances would say "wow, cool!" and then not decide to spend a dollar and try it out. It seems that an enormous amount of self-promotion would be required to make better results likely. The market clearly does not favor this kind of product, but the amazing thing is how often I still hear about friends wanting to get into selling software or games to consumers. I always tell them to consider getting into the enterprise market instead, which is comparatively boring but has a reasonable chance of providing non-trivial income. Say what you will about corporations, but they actually pay for software. My advice to anyone with similar options is to sell software to businesses and maybe hardware to consumers. This effectively rules out most entertainment products. Some people are not discouraged by that, but those people will almost certainly be working day jobs for the foreseeable future anyway. I'm lucky to have enough free time and money where continuing work on these projects is possible without compromising on quality of life, but the odds are they will never be a primary source of income and I'm OK with that.

imaginenore 12y ago
Oh, the entitlement. You simply didn't create something engaging enough. Popular games make a lot of money. Take Minecraft - it was created by one guy and made hundreds of millions of dollars before he actually turned it over to a team. Whining about models and price schemes and markets is pointless. If you want to make money, you have to create something people are willing to pay for.
- tree_of_item 12y ago
  Notch made a good game, sure, but Minecraft basically won the lottery. It's not a good example of anything. There are lots of other great games that fall victim to the phenomena described by guscost.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  When discussing the mobile market, and especially the iOS mobile market, we are talking about a consumer who typically thinks nothing of dropping $4.50 for a 12 oz. cup of badly roasted espresso with steamed milk. That they don't want to pay $0.99 for something they think is "really neat" and arguably longer lasting than a cup of "cappuccino" says more about their (consumers') sense of entitlement than the value of the products under discussion.

ForHackernews 12y ago

I don't see why this is so weird. Usually, people do things they enjoy for free, and if you want them to do something unpleasant, then you have to pay them to do it. Artists are essentially asking to get paid to do something they enjoy (for some value of "enjoy"). That's a nice gig if you can get it, but I can see why it would be a hard sell to consumers.

tjradcliffe 12y ago
It's weird because how I feel about my work has absolutely nothing to do with its market value. Zero. I work for money. If you want to experience my work, you'll pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't get to see it. My enjoyment in creating the work is the same whether or not you pay for it. Your enjoyment is what you're paying for. If you don't want it enough to pay for it, it's your loss. This is equally true of my work as a scientist, as a software engineer, as a poet (http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html http://www.siduri.net/cindylooyou/index.html) and as a novelist (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/B00KBH5O8K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1418500862&sr=8-1&keywords=darwin%27s+theorem http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...). The market value of what I create (science: moderate, software: very high, poetry: almost zero, novel: barely more than almost zero) has nothing at all to do with my enjoyment of the act of creation, which is extremely high in all cases. Some of my work I do for free for various reasons of my own, but mostly you have to pay for it if you want to have it, and I get to say that because it's my work. I own it. I made it. I created it. I'm an arrogant prick and if you don't like that... too bad. Go rip off someone else's work. I'm making good money from the stuff people are willing to pay for, and having lots of fun with everything I do, and so the loss is all on the side of those who can't appreciate the value of my other work. If you think you deserve the output of my creativity without paying me simply because I enjoy the act of creation, the problem is all on your side.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  You seem really defensive about this. Presumably some employer pays you to do your work as a scientist and a software engineer, and in the absence of that incentive, you would not do identical work.

mkramlich 12y ago

I've been playing and designing games of several kinds since childhood, including dabbling in tabletop RPG writing/design. So I hear you. I'd love to know if your experience was with your own original RPG or did you just work on adventures/expansions for other systems (D&D, etc)? I once took a shot at writing and publishing a GURPS compatible adventure, independently, and gave up because SJG either forebade it or simply made it too annoying. And that was the "final straw" beyond already knowing that my total hourly ROI for the project almost certainly would have been bad. Far too bad for a craft that takes such a rare and above-average set of intellectual skills. However I was "lucky" also to have been programming since childhood, and that is one field that historically does pay well for one's time.