It’s not about copyright, IP, F2P, piracy. I have no problem with games as service as well.
It’s something about computer games and business model, it’s the elephant in the room: we don’t master game development. We don’t.
@tiedtiger wrote:
If you are struggling with the same moral question, then my advice is simple: Get over it. Repeat sales is a basic business model, used from fine restaurants to lowly casinos.
Casinos and restaurants master every single thing involved in their processes, this is how they make money, not so much because they repeat sales (it’s not so much the volume it’s the margin, ask Apple). Decades, centuries of experience. A restaurant knows exactly how it’s going to work out for that red velvet cake, restaurants have a worldwide map of people’s taste/costs to produce meals today. It’s known. Casinos have the house edge. No mystery, randomness close to zero.
Us? We have incompatible tools, we have no idea who we are aiming for, we have no game audio standard, we reinvent the wheel constantly and we never know exactly when a cake game is done! We breath chaos.
We never know exactly when a game is done and what is going to take to please people. People don’t know either.
Therefore the F2P paradigm doesn’t work so well if at all, and that’s my problem with it. It’s a timing problem.
I give some tracks and songs for free. I know what it takes to make a song and also know what it takes to make a game, a polished game. It’s way harder than anything I have ever done, add the fact that you don’t know what you will sell in a F2P scenario (everything is possible) and that if you make bad choices you can kill two years of work instantly, I mean it’s suicidal right?
That’s why I still think the shareware model, free demo (generous), paid game (from let’s say $2 to $20) and of course micro-transactions later seems the strongest and fairest way to sustain a gamedev team and make people happy. Nothing greedy in this (I’m talking about independent developers here, obviously).
I don’t want players to think making games as a funny hobby. It’s hard work. I think we shot ourselves in the foot by selling $.99 games, people have NO IDEA how hard -or long- it is to make a great game, that stupid price made them believe that it’s actually easy and painless. The ratio amount of work/money made is the worst of any kind of entertainment. To go back to Tadhg’s analogy, people have a notion of what is going on in their plate at a restaurant. They have no idea with the freshly downloaded title on their digital device.
I think we need to stop running for virtual gold mines or leaning on the good old brick & mortar past. We should start being honest with the audience, educate people, that will help shaping up better connections with players leading to better games. We will learn more, have better tools, tweak all that until it’s running perfectly well.
Like for food the business model angle or the art angle will blend and we will be ready to embrace a MasterGameDesigner show on TV.