Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.
Lot money divided by many people = little money
Lot money in one person not divided. Still lot
Thanks for coming to my ted talk
Also - didn’t say it made it impossible to develop a game. Nice go making weird assumptions, though.
You can’t act like media doesn’t help inform your biases. Sure, your opinion on nonexistent crime fighting turtles may not have changed, since that is complete fantasy. But your view on crime itself?
I saw Batman as a kid, and, though Batman obviously isn’t real, crime certainly is, and so are urban decay and bad neighbourhoods in cities. Seeing Batman take out goons and thugs made be believe those goons and thugs existed, and that I’d be in danger if I went out at night. More scared, in fact, because I knew Batman wouldn’t save me, since he isn’t real. The Batman films made Batman feel necessary, and his absence made the world scarier.
My comment wasn’t aimed at Re-Logic precisely, and I admit I was only making assumptions. My assumption was that their company fit into the mold of how capitalist companies operate. If they are a co-op, and practise profit sharing, then I admit I was wrong in my assumption, but I hope you agree it’s an assumption closely related to the reality of capitalist economics.
EDIT: Re-Logic has an owner. Sorry, my original comment stands.
Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative
Apart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.
paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.
That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.
But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.
Yep, like I just said.
The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.
I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.
You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.
Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.
If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op
That’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.
(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)
You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.
but successful co-ops of any scale are pretty rare which suggests a general unwillingness for workers to take on a share of the risks of the business.
No, it suggests that co-ops are ill-equipped to compete. It’s a moral decision, not a business one, and an incredibly risky one. Any company that isn’t willing to exploit its workers will be beaten out by one that is willing to do that, because the competitive, capitalist one will inevitably have more resources to throw behind it.
Think about this: for a company to be a co-op, it either has to be founded that way, or changed some time afterward. A company that runs in a traditionally capitalist way can only have fundamental changes happen at the behest of its owner; workers have no say how their business is run. This means that the small amount of co-ops has nothing to do with workers’ willingness to take risks. It has to do with owners not wanting to relinquish power and profit - an owner can only lose when transitioning to a co-op.
I’m not saying that Re-Logic should be a co-op. I’m saying our entire economic system demands that they exploit their workers.