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.
It is clunky and I am also old, slow, and uncoordinated. I did manage to finish it, and I ended up liking it overall. I didn’t care for the Batmobile stuff, and I was never good at it. But once I got “good enough” at the Batmobile sections and could solve the puzzles, etc, I have to admit I found it satisfying in the same way you feel after getting your taxes or colonoscopy over with.
If you decide to walk away from it, you aren’t missing anything super fantastic. I love the series, but there’s no requirement to complete all of the games. Life is short, there are lots of other things to do. No need to beat your head against the wall on it.
You might like the Spider-Man games better. The combo moves, power ups, suit choices, etc, are more customizable there and I think it ‘flows’ better. Zipping around a realistic map of NYC is really damned cool, too. (Though I did find myself missing the moody atmosphere and je ne sais quoi of Gotham and Bats). There is are the occasional nasty / annoying boss fights in Spider-Man (one of them early on) but once you face roll past them, the rest of the game is hella fun.
Yeah, the Spider-Man games are a good comparison. A ton of different moves you can do but most of them are pretty easy and intuitive to pull of. I’m patiently waiting for Spider-Man 2 to arrive on PC.
I think I’ll invest a few more hours into Arkham Knight and if I can’t get into it I’ll try Origins. And if that one doesn’t do it for me either I’ll just play Asylum again.
Tacking on my unsolicited two cents - I gave Origins a very, very fair go (added an easy 30 hours to my playtime and even completed some challenge paths for my sense of accomplishment), and while it does try to emulate the success of its prequels, ultimately it falls short of its predecessor.
Arkham City is a perfect balance of all the elements introduced during the series; it doesn’t feel incomplete (although Asylum works great as an entry point) yet it’s not an overbloated mess like Knight. Its story also feels more emotionally involved and the plethora of characters is incorporated well.
What I’m reading is that it’s a quick way to lower expenses and pad the investors’ pockets, flooding the market with developers and reducing their value, to then hire them back a few months later at lower salaries.
That sounds like what I see people comment on Lemmy. Those opinions or impressions are not necessarily true though, or seeing the full picture.
People are laid off, which makes the news. But many others remain employed, those don’t make the news. Many others founded or found new companies, which don’t make the news.
Creating your own company, with all its investment, management, and risk involved is much scarier, higher investment and risk, personally and professionally, than being employed. Some people are willing to take that leap, others not.
I imagine profitably in creating games is very hard. You need to grow a user base or publicity. The market is flooded with games, publishers, and developers. Only the big ones have marketing budgets big enough that the marketing makes a bigger impact on profitability than the quality and discoverability of the product. (Like CoD investing a similar amount into marketing as the product development cost. And marketing is effective - more than a good game or product.)
Either way, I don’t feel I have an overview of the whole market situation, or statistics on the broader market and development people movement. But I’m sure “why don’t people start their own companies” is a wrong premise. They do. Some do. We just don’t see it.
The hiring back is unlikely to be the same people too. It’s new people. At the cost of experience, and possibly gain on lower salaries. I’d be skeptical it’s generally good long-term management though. Short-term management is popular. Lay off, you reduced costs, get more people, you increased productivity - and the cycle continues. Managers gotta manage. (/s)
I liked it as much as the others ASIDE from the tank missions. they leaned on the tank WAY too much. There are two or three tank battles where you will be pulling your hair out for sure. Definitely focus on upgrading the tank as much as you can because you will need all the help you can get.
If they go off to form their own studio, they probably have to take out a business loan to pay themselves for the time being. Interest rates are high right now, and rent and food are both expensive. It’s a huge gamble to make a game and put it out on the assumption you’ll be able to pay back 6%+ interest on whatever you took out. Games are not a reliable money maker. Especially from new studios.
Even if you get some sort of deal with a publisher to fund your first endeavor, there will still be strings attached to that, and publishers are pretty tight with the purse strings right now.
Which means really the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
the only viable option, assuming you’re not already independently wealthy, is that you have to work another job to work on the game in the meantime, which means it will take even longer to come out.
So many Indie developers are making the mistake of thinking they’ll be the next [insert currently successful one-man dev here] and banking their careers and life savings on it. 99.999% of them are not.
Ain’t no way a brand new game studio is getting a loan at 6%. If they can even get a business loan at all (good luck!), it would be at a much higher interest rate due to the risk, and/or require assets to be held in collateral (only an option if you’re already wealthy to begin with…)
Short answer: money. It’s no secret devs are usually overworked and underpaid so even a large-ish group of developers from even some of the more popular companies getting murdered simply can’t afford to start a business. Some of them could go the Kickstarter route but few would be successful as is the way for Kickstarter.
Już tą kwestię przerabialiśmy. Niestety odpowiedzią osób tworzących nasze oprogramowanie jest, że nie jest to oprogramowanie do udostępniania zdjęć, tylko linków. W najbliższym czasie nie ma raczej szans na taką funkcjonalność.
I genuinely enjoyed Arkham Knight, but those mandatory Batmobile sections are easily the most miserable part of the game. If we had those for an entire game, it might not be too bad, but most of the time you just end up using it to get from point A to point B. If you can put up with being stuck for a bit on those sections, you might enjoy it.
Its big issue is that it has to follow up on Arkham City. It’s not a bad game by any stretch, but it’s following up to one of the best superhero games out there. If you’re not invested in the story, there’s no harm in dropping it. Play something you’ll have fun with.
It has its issues for sure, but the gameplay certainly isn’t one of them (barring the tank sections). I recently played all four games back to back and Knight has by far the most responsive and fluid combat in the series.
Imo the problems are the tank sections, and the story. Overall the story isn’t terrible or anything, but…
Tap for spoilerThe Jason Todd twist was so obvious and had zero build up in any of the prior games. They really should’ve just stuck with Scarecrow and hallucination Joker.
But even just the fact that we’ve never once heard of him until this entry, and suddenly we’re getting loads of backstory, makes the “reveal” comically obvious.
As a counterpoint to most of the cynicism here, this is how the company I now work for formed. Caveats include: the founder had a lot of money because he had previously worked for a big name Internet company when it was a startup, and we spend almost all of our time as contractors for other studios rather than developing in-house IP.
Indie studios do in fact exist. I haven’t bought a game from a major publisher since… uhh… well, I guess I bought Portal for $1 last year, does Valve still count as a major publisher?
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