Beyond just game studios, why aren’t there more employee owned companies?
When Starbucks was unionizing I made the comment that if I were the corporation I would just get out and let the employees run it. I got flamed for this attitude. What is so terrible about employee owned companies?
The question I was answering was “why aren’t there more employee owned companies?” And the answer is it’s a lot harder to get seed money for those, because the rent seeking parasites don’t want them to exist.
People literally buy into the idea that they wouldn’t know how to do anything if they weren’t being told what to do. They think that value comes from above.
They think that when a company sells them raspberries, that company invented the raspberry bush. They don’t realize that the raspberries were already there. They certainly don’t realize that they themselves are another kind of bush. Or that the labor bush operates without a company to own it and sell its labor berries.
Grow a bunch of labor bushes and make it incredibly clear that it’s not about them being owned, but about them being labor bushes.
To me the change from the current system doesn’t come by diving into the current system and trying to ask it nicely. It doesn’t come from asking permission at all. It comes from operating with zero concern or tolerance for capitalist bullshit.
Go help people who can’t afford to pay you. Make something beautiful and give it to the world in a way that gives them an opportunity to prop you up, but that also lets them enjoy it without having to be rich or emptying their wallet.
Internalize the idea that wealth is not a virtue, and poverty is not an ill. People who need help are an opportunity to help, and people who have value are in a position to use it to help, but holding onto that value and using it are mutually exclusive.
It’s not going to come from a politician or some big speaker or a revolution, it’s going to come from individual people in their own lives lives making different choices. Your choices matter.
I drive a cab and get paid very little to basically drive around and help people. Like, the job is to drive people from point A to point B, but I try to do more than that, and help people who need it along the way. I carry a lot of stuff around that I’m not really paid for and I try to go the extra mile for people.
If the projects I’m working on pan out and I manage to get to a place where I have more resources, I plan to use that as a way of making other small steps. Setting up a coop instead of chasing money, releasing a game license that allows independent producers to do their own thing. Things like that. Literally just leaving the door open for people instead of slamming it shut.
I don’t really have any intent to code software outside of games, but I’d like to empower others to be able to make the things they want to make and not just feed some big parasitic company with it.
Employee owned companies are more stable in economic downturns but they also require much more diversification to replace the owner/manager roles where there is actually shit to do. Big item being the book keeping it’s simple enough in theory but in practice even smaller companies can take hours just to understand where you’re starting from.
Not splitting the profits, tracking bills, making sure they’re all paid on time, making sure the company is getting paid on time depending on your business plan, tracking any special taxes you gotta pay, tracking price increases in long term contracts, list goes on
Probably because the owners want to take all of the profit and employees do not have the capital to make the investment.
It takes a certain benevolent capitalist to convert their business to employee owned (Bobs Red Mill intensifies). Such businesses only represent 12% of the private sector
Benevolent capital is out there, especially in the startup phase. I find it arrogant and ignorant, but available. It does require risk-sharing which I find doesn’t fit the vision of the borrower.
Like the literal law. In most places it’s a much more involved and expensive process to even open a coop compared to a traditional private company. It takes more paperwork, more fees, more capital funds etc. Also, getting investors in (when they can’t own the coop, as they are not workers) or even loans from private or state banks/institutions is much harder. There are several programs incentivising people to open private companies, giving them tax credits, making the application and approval process easier, giving access to funds and education etc. How many there are for coops? In most places around the world there are 0. In what ways does it appear the opposite to you…? Like this all seems very self-evident to me.
I don’t know where you are located. I am in the US and a co-op is just a corporation so all the things that apply to a private corporation apply to a co-op. When applying for grants there are no differentiators that I can think of. One advantage for a co-op here is that there are no passive investors.
For my city, just for a very specific example, it takes less than one afternoon and 80 bucks total (no fees and almost no capital fund requirements) to open a corporation. It takes weeks if not months to open a coop and it costs 2500 bucks PER member.
I don’t know the specifics of all cities and states everywhere in the world. But the system is built to benefit private corporations much more, as it’s a capitalist system where owning capital equals power, and workers are a commodity.
The tabletop system is intended to be modular, with subsystems that can easily be added, removed, or tuned for different genres. The initial playtest I did was in a zombie survival setting, currently we’re doing a campaign that’s got a bit more of a Shadowrunny type feel, mixing technological dystopia and magic. The idea is to put out a core book in those settings as well as a fantasy setting and a space opera setting, so people can mix and match subsystems and do whatever they like with it.
I applied programming concepts to the design of the mechanics themselves in a way that I hope makes them more intuitive and tries to maintain a steady flow of tension and release without a bunch of pausing to check stuff once you know the system.
I don’t want to give too much of the details away, but I do plan to release a system resource document along with the actual books. And it’ll be released under an anti-corporate license, so other small creators can make modules for it, but big companies will have to shell out if they want to play ball.
Once that’s ready to go I have a couple of video games planned using the same system. One of them ties heavily into themes of abuse and autonomy, the other is about time travel. I have some of the early stages of the art and some shaders and stuff done for these, and have set up a few mechanics, but they’re still kind of on the back burner. I’ve been teaching myself music theory and composition so the soundtrack doesn’t become an afterthought, and I feel like there’s still something conceptual I’m missing at the core of the visual design. I’ll get there, though.
That sounds cool. Are you using any particular tools to organize your ideas/systems? That was one of the reasons I was curious--turning ideas into something real seems daunting.
I use Trello a bit, but not consistently. I’ll use it at the beginning of a project to kind of map things out, then come back a few times to kind of check in with where I’m at and see if there’s anything I’m not thinking of. I also have a ton of note files just laying all over my computer, my discord, and my notesnook account. I used to use Google Docs, but I don’t really want them scraping my stuff for their AI before I even get to finish it.
Honestly I just kind of operate like a blob. I expand in a bunch of different directions on a project a little bit at a time until it starts to come together. Stuff percolates and another piece will fall into place and I’ll get a burst of momentum. Eventually I’ll notice I’m banging my head against something that doesn’t work and I’ll realize I’m looking in the wrong place or I don’t have the right thing yet and I’ll work on some other component.
A lot of stuff just kind of comes to me at random times and I try to get it out before I forget it. But it also involves a lot of like sort of flow state thinking keeping track of how different pieces of a thing connect with one another.
But also like, I feel like you kind of have to be comfortable just having a bunch of files full of concepts that don’t necessarily go anywhere immediately? Like, you need to be ready to just throw some shit out there, see how it works, chop massive pieces off of it or throw it away entirely. The moment you let yourself be self-conscious about your work or worry if you’re “really going in the right direction” you’re fucked. I mean, you can have that moment I guess as long as you don’t stay in it, but it’s the drive and the confidence that gets the actual thing finished whether anybody sees it or not.
You have to do something. You can always do something else later.
Once it’s done I feel like that’s its own other game entirely. Like, I have some guerilla marketing ideas and some former contacts I can try to get on the radar of, but that’s another phase of things. I can’t worry too much about that while I’m over here in playtesting, tweaking, and adding play-informed mechanics land.
Like right now we’re just basically playing a game and I’ll stop suddenly in the middle of it and be like oh I need to add something, and I take some notes and then we keep going. A lot of the time at the end of the session I know pretty much what I need to do; whether a mechanic is too complicated or fiddly or not robust enough or needs something else to compensate for it or whatever, it becomes evident when you watch it play out.
I’m not really sure how I’d ever get anything done if I was too focused on the organization of it, to be honest. I give myself enough hats without trying to also be a hat rack.
My gaming groups (both tabletop and video) are leaning into experimental phase of trying new stuff. Count me in if I ever come across your release in the wild.
On the music and visual side. If at all possible I highly recommend finding or hiring someone to at least review what you have and advise, if not doing all the work. There's so much to both that it takes ages to get right but they can have such a huge impact as you seem to know.
I’m going for very specific look of stylized visuals that’ll play well into my animation experience with Flash. I’ve got the shader for it pretty much nailed, I’m just working on my actual like body concept stuff and I’m not fully sold on the actual perspective angle I’ve been playing with. I definitely have a lot of artist and animator friends who have seen it and I’ve gotten good feedback.
But yeah, on the music side of things, I honestly think I want to try to find some folks to play with some time soon. I’m still shoring up my performance end of things, but playing some bass and/or keyboard and/or guitar with a band would probably help my ear a lot and also give me some folks that I could have a musical understanding with who could help me with the soundtrack.
I’d honestly love to release a sort of grungy album. Most of what I’ve been composing seems to lean into experimental guitar stuff, but it’s all still pretty raw.
When Google fired all of those staffers last year there was a report that there was a huge bump in startups being formed. That’s where actual innovation happens, not at large companies but the small startups. I see that happening now too. They’ll eventually get bought up, but the cycle will repeat.
First time I played it I hated it. That was just after finishing the previous one. I came back to it like 6mos later and it was fantastic. Just needed a break I guess. The controls do suck a bit at first and it takes some getting used to.
Origins is better, in my opinion. It’s the black sheep but it’s my favourite in the series.
Arkham Knight is my least favourite but I still like it. If you really hate the tank sections, though, you might not like it no matter how long you play. That’s a pretty big part of the game, and it’s not great.
The story is also dumb.
major story spoilersIt would have been way better if Barbara was the arkham knight, having faked her death and the suit could have had mechanical legs to help her walk and her voice digitally altered to sound like a man. Instead we got another Jason Todd as the Red Hood with a different name.
ETA: I’m curious whether the downvotes are because I think Origins is better or because you don’t like my idea for how the story could have been improved.
I just finished playing the original FF7 for the first time in like two decades. I always secretly dreaded trying to play it again, worried that it wouldn’t have aged that well as a game, or that my nostalgia was propping it up as a masterpiece when perhaps it wasn’t.
It sucked me in and I ended up doing a 100% completion playthrough. The experience has shifted my thinking and now I’m more willing to replay older games. Just last week I found my old CD Keys and started up Diablo 2, the original, not the remaster. Now I’ve been sucked into that.
I personally am finding that mechanically, these older games have systems with lots of depth and creativity. They give you so many options and choices, and they rarely explain all of it so your kind of left to just… experience it. I am sure this is not true for every retro game ( and ditto for some new games ) but it is something I have been feeling when playing older games.
I wish I could offer some advice, I’m on windows 11. I downloaded the game files from Blizzards website (had to google it, its kind of buried), and used my CD keys from my game cases. Honestly I was surprised I didn’t have to do much tinkering to make it work. I think all I did was make sure it launches with compatibility mode enabled in the properties of the .exe
Definitely try solo stuff with plugy. I installed D2 for a nice bnet session of baalruns but bnet was a bit riddled fuckhole. I tried plugy before uninstalling and it got me hooked on solo play for 3 more years.
I was going to try Plugy earlier this week but I just discovered Project Diablo 2 which comes with some of the QoL features from Plugy and more. It’s been phenomenal! Absolutely check it out if you haven’t.
The ps2 had THE BEST library of any console, even to this day. I am still learning about random hiddem gems ive never heard of on it, and I’ve been gaming for 25 years
Many retro games are better. AA games were made with heart back then & that made it possible to make games that are incredible both in terms of artistry, grandeur and gameplay. Games like Baldur’s Gate 1-2, Chrono Cross etc are not possible in today’s climate.
On the other hand we have been handed indie games like Celeste and Hollow Knight, so I don’t know. Amazing games still exists, it’s just not really comparable.
I love the PS2. Many great games, played a lot of Lego Star Wars II on it. I still play on mine every few days, it’s a great system. Games today aren’t like this anymore.
Play what you enjoy. The old games can look better because you skip through to the best ones over the last 50+ years. Many were buggy, had terrible controls or were just boring. You’re probably not wasting your time on those.
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