GBGamesWhile I won’t be going to the Game Developers Conference this year, I thought I would share some tips for making the most of your GDC 2012 badge and holder. These tips are especially important for people who will be attending their first GDC, such as some of the fantastic students I met when I spoke at the University of Iowa last Friday.
Feel free to share this post. And thanks, Ian Schreiber, for these tips when I attended my first GDC last year!
I’ll be part of a group of game developers talking to students at University of Iowa on Friday, February 24th, 2012.
Where: Room 240 of Art Building West, Iowa City, IA
When: 4PM
Other speakers include people from Glass Cannon Games, Zach Ellsbury of Seraphic Software, iOS developer Karl Becker, and P.J. Lorenz, organizer of the Midwest Indie Game Developers Meetup group.
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software wrote about being an indie game bottom feeder. He breaks it down into a few principles.
Stop worrying about piracy and worry about being a person your customers want to support
He talks about coming to terms with the fact that piracy happens. Interestingly, he finds the best way to “combat piracy” isn’t to pass onerous laws such as SOPA but to be a decent person that your games’ players would feel good supporting.
Price appropriately
If you are creating an ultra-casual, appeals-to-everyone kind of game, you can get away with charging less than a dollar or even releasing the game for free and using ads or selling add-ons. But if you’re appealing to an underserved niche, you must charge more for your game. Having 5,000 customers pay you only $1 means you won’t last long. The good news is that your customers are willing to pay for it.
Find the customers who are looking for what is no longer being made
Most small business advice out there says that you should find a niche, Vogel’s advice is similar, except he points out that there are plenty of game genres that used to be wildly popular and are no longer of interest to the larger companies in the game industry. Those are now underserved niches. While the popularity of these now-niches has dropped below the point where EA or Activision would find it worth their time, there are enough people who still want to play those kinds of games to make it profitible for an indie.
Vogel mentions the Atari 2600, which was my first game console. I remember playing games such as Frog n’ Flies, Yar’s Revenge, Solar Fox, and even E.T for hours on end.
And the Atari 2600 is still fun. It’s just not fun enough. The art of game design has progressed far beyond it, and Pitfall doesn’t have what it takes to compete anymore. But you know something? All of those old games can be updated. All of those old genres have tons of fans out there. They just don’t know they’re fans yet.
So does this mean you should clone old games and expect to make tons of money so long as you’re not a jerk?
No, and not just because the clones have been done already.
You can take inspiration from old games that are otherwise still fun today. Take the original Mario Bros for example. It was a platformer with a static level design, and you could collect coins and hit enemies from below before knocking them out. Now look at Super Crate Box, a platformer with a static level design in which you collect crates and use a variety of weapons to fight off enemies. Tell me where you think it partly takes its inspiration from. Yet, it plays very differently. The developers didn’t create a Mario Bros clone. They did something very different.
I think Vogel’s approach sounds similar to Dan Cook’s “reinventing the genre from the root” approach.
It occurred to me that game design, like any evolutionary process, is sensitive to initial conditions. If you want to stand out, you need to head back in time to the very dawn of a genre, strike out in a different direction and then watch your alternate evolutionary path unfurl.
Perhaps having kept my Atari 2600 all these years was a much better idea than I thought.
I just jumped years into the future with both my cell phone and my computer. The future is a mixed bag.
The Cell Phone
For quite a few years now, I’ve had a flip-phone and was paying for service out of contract. When people started getting smartphones, I kind of wanted one, but never enough to justify the cost of a phone or tying myself to a new 2-year contract to get a free one.
I did the math recently. I found out that for what I pay just for voice, data, and texting would be equivalent to getting a new smartphone with a contract. I’d even be able to take advantage of the data plan since the one with my flip-phone which became nearly unusable when they stopped supporting some of the already-poorly supported video options. I went with my fiancee’s Sprint-based provider instead of AT&T, and that referral netted me a discount that made it even cheaper.
So now I have an Android, the HTC EVO Shift, and I’m fairly happy with it. It’s way more useful than my old phone.
Plus, now I can play the games everyone has been talking about.
Plus plus, I have a device to test my own projects when I start mobile development.
However, I’m still getting used to figuring out how to hold it since I seem to keep accidentally hitting the search button or some part of the screen. I still hit the volume control on the side too often, and I press the power button as I slide the device into my pocket if I’m not careful. And as great as having a keyboard is, the phone automatically unlocks when I slide it out, which has accidentally happened in my coat pocket more than once already. While my old phone let me easily look up a name in my phone book since I could type a letter and it would jump to that section of my phone book, this new device seems to think I want to include everyone I’ve ever emailed, Tweeted, circled on G+, or friended on Facebook when I want to search for someone to call.
But this is the future, and the benefits are outweighing the negatives. Being able to fit a computer more powerful and integrated than my first desktop into my pocket has so far been pretty amazing.
The Computer
And speaking of computers, I’ve mentioned my dying laptop a few weeks ago. My Dell Precision M90 was a fine machine until the video card started failing. I’ve purchased a replacement: the Precision M6600.
I’m going from:
That last item unfortunately feels like a downgrade to me. I really liked having a 1920×1200 display. The extra lines of resolution were great for coding work. Unfortunately, it seems that 1920×1200 will no longer be available for most laptops. There’s no real explanation, either. There’s merely speculation that the hardware manufacturers will save money, especially since most people probably just want to watch movies on their laptops anyway.
Still, this new laptop came with Windows 7, and while I’ve used Windows Vista by being the default tech support guy for my family, I hadn’t really become familiar with anything since Windows XP, which is what my old laptop came with. The new interface is somewhat jarring. When I was running Firefox and had the download window open as well as the main browser, I wanted to minimize it, and so I clicked on the button in the taskbar, like I normally would. Instead of minimizing Firefox, it popped up a the windows as buttons so I could choose which one I wanted. Darn new-fangled tech doing things differently than I expected…
But no matter! I repartitioned the drive so that Windows gets about 100GB, and I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the remaining space. And it turns out that Ubuntu is all new and shiny, too.
See, I used Ubuntu 10.04 Long-Term Support (LTS), and I didn’t want to upgrade to newer versions because I wanted a stable development system to do my work on.
So here I am, jumping two years’ worth of Ubuntu development, and this new Unity interface threw me for a bit until I realized they were trying to make it seem more Mac-like. There’s a launcher, and the buttons are all big and shiny, and there’s a Software Center where I can easily click and download apps and even purchase them. There’s quite a few indie games there, and it seems like it could be a decent marketplace.
But after looking at the entire games collection, I took the time to find the Terminal (more on that later) and typed: “apt-get install nethack-console” as fast as I could.
And then I added the Terminal to the launcher.
Seriously, it’s nice that the UI is 3D-powered and all, but sometimes I don’t want to mess around with a frickin’ mouse. I LIKED being able to open the system menu at a keypress and see ALL of my installed applications. Now I have to explicitly type to search or click on Dash, then click on “More Apps”, and then click some more? On the old system, I could hit Alt+F1 to open the “Applications” menu, then use the arrow keys to move to “Accessories” > Terminal. Now, I press the Windows key to bring up Dash, and if I know the name of the application, I can type it out right there, but if I don’t, it’s faster to click on “More Apps”, then go to “Installed” and click on “see all”, then scroll down until I find it.
I also liked being able to figure out how to open a file within an application by just looking at the screen. Unity has Mac-like context menus that applications share at the top of the screen, which…ok, whatever. Maybe it’s great, and I’ll try it, but why Unity hides the menu until you mouse over it, I don’t know, but I’m not the only one who is unhappy with it. Maybe I just need to get used to it, but there were a couple of times when I opened an application and wondered why the heck I had no way to open a file since the window I was using (seriously, why would I want to shift my eyes all the way to the top of the screen when the application I’m using is over here?) didn’t have a File option.
Unity also seems to hate the idea of customization. At least Windows let me move the taskbar around the screen. Why does the launcher have to stay stuck to the left side? Why do my windows have to have the close and minimize buttons to the left like on a Mac when I prefer them on the right? I’ve yet to find a way to change anything to work the way I want it to work.
I’m aware that it is possible to replace Unity with Ubuntu Classic UI or KDE, but I’m going to try to stick things out just to see how most users are expected to run their new Ubuntu-based systems. I actually do like being able to see all running application instances in an Exposé-like way, and there are parts of the UI that feel more intuitive. And Ubuntu 11.10 does seamlessly run 32-bit and 64-bit applications. I ran Stop That Hero! just to see if I had all of my development libraries installed, and I didn’t even realize that it shouldn’t have worked on this new 64-bit machine. So that was a pleasant surprise.
But if this is the future of computers, where laptop screens get smaller resolutions instead of larger ones, where the UI is made out of candy and shiny at the expense of being useful for people who know what they are doing, I’m not sure I’m happy about it.
I feel like the future is pushing me out of the way to make room for people who just want to watch widescreen movies or use a “workstation” as nothing more than a consumer electronics device.
Am I being unreasonable? Am I just disoriented because everything is different in the future? Is it better and I just need to get used to it?
If you’re not familiar with AltDevBlogADay, you should be. Each day, a game developer posts on a variety of game development topics. There’s a huge backlog of content there now, and while the recent redesign has made it difficult to find the category you want (you have to click on a post to see only some of the tags available as of this writing), it’s great getting regular, up-to-date, state-of-the-art tips and tricks from the people in the trenches. Authors can be mainstream game programmers, indie developers, academics, or anyone who has something valuable to share.
It seems to be such a successful site that they’ve decided to host an online conference. AltDevConf will be held on February 11th and 12th (that’s this coming weekend), featuring three tracks: education, programming, and design & production.
Our goal is twofold: To provide free access to a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts, and to create a space where bright and innovative voices can also be heard. We are able to do this, because as an online conference we are not subject to the same logistic and economic constrains imposed by the traditional conference model.
As it doesn’t look like I’ll be attending GDC this year (I’m still hoping to win an All Access Pass with my GDC magnets), AltDevConf seems like a high-quality substitute. While it won’t be the same as rubbing elbows with other indies or meeting cool celebrities in the gaming world, I’m excited about it.
Do you plan to attend? Will you be speaking?
Yesterday, I woke up to an email saying that Michael Simms is stepping down after 10 years of running Linux Game Publishing and Tux Games.
Wow, 10 years! That’s a lot of enthusiasm and work, and unfortunately it takes its toll:
It took me some months to notice what was going on, and even longer to accept that my burnout was going to kill LGP unless I did something about it. The lack of drive slowed down production of new titles, shipping, customer service, everything that I either handled or had a big part in helping with, was all being compromised.
…
But I didn’t want to let the company die. Of course not, I have invested too much time, money, blood sweat and tears into LGP to just say ‘That is it, bye’. And so I sat down and had a long think about how to save it.
Clive Crous will take the reins at LGP and Tux Games. Good luck, Clive, and good luck with your future endeavors, Michael!
A month ago, there was a post on Reddit asking what people thought about indie developers asking for money up front.
Some people are fine if they get a good quality playable build for pre-ordering, but no one seemed to be happy with the idea of funding basic engine development. It seems the general consensus is that people are getting tired of the so-called “fad” of funding a game before it is finished with no guarantee that they will see a payoff.
Minecraft‘s wild success through pre-orders aside, it’s not really a new funding tactic at all. Lots of indie developers have tried to ask for money before their games are finished, and some have seen more success than others.
The Indie Game Development Survival Guide
Today, sites such as KickStarter and 8-bit Funding have enabled a number of high-profile projects to get funding from fans. Of course, a lot of projects don’t get funded and therefore don’t become high-profile.
So if you don’t have a big name to leverage like Notch or Andy Schatz or Derek Yu, are you doomed to obscurity?
No, but obviously an existing name brand helps. Otherwise, success at crowdfunding requires hard work to get your name out there. In other words, marketing. And you have to be able to demonstrate you can deliver the goods.
I started taking pre-orders for Stop That Hero! late last year, and I’ll admit feeling a bit anxious about it at the time. I didn’t have the game in a playable state yet, and here I was asking people for money in anticipation of the initial release.
While I didn’t get many pre-orders, it was definitely a nice feeling to see people actually spending some money on my game. It showed some interest, and it gave me a productivity boost to know I had existing customers to satisfy.
Now, when it comes to how I marketed the Stop That Hero! pre-order, I’m sure I did a lot of things wrong. Perhaps I should have had more videos of game play as I continued work. Maybe I should have been posting more screenshots. I could have chosen to prioritize work on certain features in the hopes that they would excite players more than the features I did work on. And maybe I wasn’t very assertive with asking for pre-orders in the first place.
At the time, I was struggling to get the alpha build across the finish line, but I kept getting good feedback from playtesters. Since the game was good enough to provide some enjoyment to players, it meant it was good enough to ask for players to pay for that enjoyment.
Now, of course some people weren’t happy with the idea of paying up front for a game they couldn’t see. And it’s hard to blame them. Since many game projects don’t get finished, it’s asking a lot to essentially gamble the cost of a pre-order on an unknown. Especially when indie developers don’t necessarily have the offsite backup solutions of larger studios when disaster strikes. See the Project Zomboid burglary for an example. All of their code was gone when someone stole two laptops, so it was a huge setback for the developers who had to rely on outdated backups to continue.
And it didn’t sit well with some of their customers, judging by the Reddit thread. It seems this experience turned some people off of pre-orders and paying for early builds in general.
All that said, it seems that making pre-orders work requires regular, quality content. Basically, if you stop talking to your customers and prospects, they’ll stop caring.
But if all you do is talk and never produce anything, no one is going to stick around. Whether you’re taking pre-orders or pledges, you have to be able to show that you can deliver results.
If you can do both, then pre-orders are worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re wasting your customers’ time as well as your own.
To go along with my last post on indie maintenance and disaster plans, I’d like to mention how I currently back up my important data.
Local Backups
I have two active computers. My main development machine is my currently dying laptop. My desktop has a backup of my laptop’s data. Using rsync and SSH, I can transfer files between devices easily, which was really helpful when I needed to replace the desktop in 2010. I simply rsynced files to my laptop, then rsynced them back to the new desktop. As my laptop has been failing recently, I’ve been using any lucidity on its part as an opportunity to rsync files to my desktop in anticipation of the laptop dying at any moment.
I also have a 1TB hard drive connected to the router, which means any computers on my network could make use of it. Unfortunately, it has to be formatted as NTFS and requires the use of Samba, which means it isn’t a perfect solution, and it also means that I use it way less than I should.
So there’s data redundancy within my computer network. If one machine or drive fails, the important data is also available on the other, and I could always find a way to make better use of my 1TB drive so that losing both computers wouldn’t be a catastrophic data loss.
But what happens if I get robbed and lose all of this equipment? Or if a fire breaks out? Or some other disaster that takes out all of the data since it is all in the same office?
Remote Solutions
Since my main project, Stop That Hero!, uses git for version control, I paid for a Micro account on GitHub, which gives me 5 private repositories and the ability to add one collaborator for just $7/month. So if I lose everything, at least I can continue to work on the project once I get a new computer.
What about other data?
While I have a DropBox account, I only have limited space available (although signing up for your own account with that link gives us each 250MB extra). DropBox offers tiered pricing plans and a team/business plan, but I can’t justify the expense at this time. I’ve been using DropBox for private data backups and as a way to quickly provide a link to a file. I know a few Flash game developers have used DropBox to put up their game for FlashGameLicense.com.
An alternative to DropBox is SpiderOak. It offers way more space than DropBox, and if you choose to pay for more space, you get more than double the capacity for the same price. Plus, data encryption works both ways, when sending or receiving. According to the SpiderOak site, they claim to be a “zero knowledge” backup provider:
This means that we do not know anything about the data that you store on SpiderOak — not even your folder or filenames. On the server we only see sequentially numbered containers of encrypted data.
Now, this encryption means that it takes a lot longer to backup files. Since you get so much more space (2GB to start, and we each get a free GB if you use the link above), backing up a few GBs of data can take a good part of your day when you start out. Plus, unlike DropBox, you aren’t tied to the DropBox folder. You can configure whatever folders and files you want to backup, and you can still share files publicly. You can configure SpiderOak to automatically back up changes at a schedule you set, and it will keep track of previous versions of files for you, too.
I’ve been fairly happy with SpiderOak so far. The only issue I ran into was related to how it was backing up my Projects folder while I was working on it. I rebuilt my project, and apparently SpiderOak was in the middle of processing the folder my project lives in, and it choked. It was probably because a file like Game.o was deleted and replaced, and it didn’t know how to handle it mid-processing. I managed to get it unstuck, but it took a support email and a perusal of the support forums to find out how. To prevent problems in the future, explicitly tell it not to backup the folder where your project build lives.
So these are some free solutions with paid options that allow you to sync multiple computers and share with friends. What if you’re looking for something more cost efficient as well as private? I have a friend who pays for a dedicated remote solution. Carbonite is $59/year for one computer, which implies that you can’t use it to sync multiple computers or share files with friends, but it’s another option available to you. Mozy is an alternative, and it’s basic plan is $5.99/month for 50GB with options to pay a little extra to sync multiple computers. There’s also a Mozy Pro set of plans for servers as well as desktops that charge per gigabyte on top of a flat fee.
What does your backup plan look like?
My Dell Precision M90, which has been running like a champ for more than half a decade despite my cats’ attempts to get their fur clogged in its fans, is finally dying. I’ve been seeing graphical glitches for some time, but I’ve been able to continue working, and the glitches eventually go away. Except when they don’t. And recently, the machine won’t boot correctly.
The culprit seems to be a failing video card, which is way too expensive to replace. It’s frustrating since doing so would probably give this machine another few years of life.
I’ve been very happy with this machine, but it’s been slowly getting worse, and I realized that I had no plans for replacing it. So I’ve been either putting off the research so I can do the work I need to do, or I’ve been desperately trying to get the machine back up and running so I can continue to do that work, all the while knowing that I am going to need to spend some time (and money) on finding a replacement.
A large company probably has plans for this sort of thing, with IT departments bringing in spare equipment or ordering replacements. In fact, some companies have entire disaster preparedness plans in place. Replacing equipment quickly to ensure business continuity is just a part of such plans.
Since I purchased this laptop through Dell Small Business, I was able to get next-day on-site tech support that I only needed to take advantage of once towards the end of the extended warranty last year, and I was also able to replace the A/C adapter quickly after the cats chewed through the old cord a few years ago. Even knowing that the warranty was expiring, I didn’t really think through how I would continue to work without the laptop, which I should have realized was as inevitable as a hard drive dying.
And now that I think about it, perhaps the cats should worry about a replacement plan as well…
As an indie or solo entrepreneur, what do you do it? How prepared are you for equipment failure? Do you only start to worry about it the day your computer fails to boot, or do you anticipate the day your development equipment needs maintenance and replacement? Or do you constantly replace your machines with the latest and greatest and so don’t need to worry about longevity?
I’ve been meaning to write about the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act, and even though they have been put on hold thanks to widespread Internet activism, they’re not dead yet, and laws like them are sure to follow.
I am a game developer and a writer. And I do not support SOPA or PIPA.
Why?
Because I rely on the Internet and copyright, and these laws would undermine both the Internet’s functionality and the perception of copyright by the public in ways that would negatively impact me.
Some Copyright History
Copyright is complicated. There isn’t one law you can look at that incorporates the entirety of it. I wrote an article long ago as a what an indie game developer needs to know about copyright, but a lot of copyright law is related to court case rulings, so to really understand copyright, you probably need an expensive lawyer.
And that’s a mere symptom of the issues I have with SOPA and related laws.
The U.S. Constitution has what is known as the Copyright Clause: Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution specifically says that Congress shall have the power to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”, and it specifies how Congress shall do so: “by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Some people have this backwards and they think that the purpose is to protect creators, but copyright is supposed to be a means to encourage the creation of useful things.
Copyright used to last 14 years, with the right to renew for another 14 years. New laws changed the length over the last couple of centuries, and today we have copyright lasting for 70 years plus the life of the author, or in the case of a corporation, 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter.
Stacking the Deck
Effectively, copyright is no longer limited. Whereas creators from 50 years ago were able to depend on a rich replenishment of the public domain in their lifetimes (Disney was able to leverage the public domain to build up a very successful company), creators today see that the public domain hasn’t changed since that time. The constant change in copyright law and copyright length benefits those creators and businesses who have the resources and existing copyrights while making it more difficult for new creators and businesses.
Recently, the Supreme Court said that the public domain isn’t permanent, and while the case was about granting copyright to foreign works that were supposed to have copyright in the first place, the idea that the public domain can be made even smaller by an action of Congress stinks for new creators.
But even if you forget about the benefits of a healthy and rich public domain, copyright laws have become more and more biased towards large, existing companies and organizations.
Abuse of Copyright
Remember the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? It was signed into law in 1998, and among its provisions, it made it a felony to merely own the means of circumventing copy protection mechanisms, even if you didn’t use the means. Even if you did circumvent the protection and weren’t committing infringement as a result.
The DMCA was supposedly necessary to protect jobs and copyright owners, yet it was horribly abused, even by those who weren’t trying to protect their copyright at all. Google found that out of all of the takedown notices it has received, more than half involved a business issuing a takedown against a competitor, and over a third were for invalid copyright claims.
For one example, under the DMCA, Viacom issued thousands of takedown notices to YouTube, and some of the content taken down wasn’t Viacom’s copyrighted works. In another example, Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and a number of other retail stores issued a takedown notice to FatWallet.com to force them to remove user-posted sales prices for their Black Friday sales, even though price lists don’t fall under copyright.
In both cases, large companies with lawyers on staff were able to leverage the law against someone else’s legitimate postings. If you are targeted wrongly by a company using the DMCA, your recourse is expensive and slow.
You can read more about other DMCA abuses at the EFF’s Ten Years of Unintended Consequences page, but these abuses are getting to the crux of the matter.
The DMCA wasn’t about protecting copyright. It was about control.
Respect for Copyright Eroded
In the past, most people didn’t create copyrighted works. It was expensive to create and distribute books, movies, TV shows, and other content. There were gatekeepers and high barriers to entry. You needed a lot of capital to start a business that relied on copyrighted content.
Today, 48 hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube every day, and most of it is not produced by the MPAA. Today, print-on-demand and ebook publishing means there are more self-published books than traditionally published books. Today, many long-standing newspapers have found it difficult to compete in a world of citizen publishing. Today, the Internet and social media has created plenty of successful new business models.
And yet we keep hearing about how the major media companies are threatened by all of this individual expression and creation, as if a few companies are supposed to be the sole producers of culture and content.
The problem is, a lot of people act as if the media companies are right!
Most people don’t have much education about copyright law. Again, part of this is because of how complicated the law is, and partly because historically most people didn’t create copyrighted works. But part of it is because the major media companies have done such a good job of telling this story. Politicians are heard parroting absurd numbers provided by the MPAA and RIAA, and any media coverage is entertainment anyway so forget about getting the facts there.
So even though copyright is a tool for all creators, what happened is that the general public views copyright as a tool of the major media companies to abuse customers and make more money. And when laws like the DMCA and SOPA are supported by politicians who clearly have no idea what impact the laws would have on new businesses and new creators, it furthers this perception of copyright as a tool of companies who can afford to buy it.
SOPA and PIPA
If you still don’t know much about SOPA or PIPA, they are twin pieces of legislation that are supposedly about protecting U.S. copyright owners against offshore rogue websites dedicated to piracy. In reality, they would do nothing to prevent actual piracy while giving major media companies more tools to (ab)use the public with. Here’s a very informative video explaining the problems with how these laws would “work”:
Now, there’s a lot of problems that people have identified. Some of it sounds overly sensationalized, yet information security experts, free speech experts, computing experts, and business experts have all agreed that the problems are real. But I’ll leave it to them to talk about the technical, financial, and social problems with the proposed laws.
SOPA supporters say that the people who are opposing it are bringing up worst-case scenarios and that the imagined abuses wouldn’t happen in real life. Well, companies such as Viacom have shown that abuse will happen, and likely sooner than later.
The infamous comparison by the MPAA that the VCR is like the “Boston Strangler” and the broadcast flag regulations are attempts to control when and how people watch movies and TV. SecuROM are attempts to prevent copying that sometimes worked so well that legally purchased games wouldn’t run on some computers. Sony BMG’s rootkit made many legitimate music CD customers unhappy when their computers were compromised, especially as the company’s President seemed to shrug about the issue. And so on and so on.
Why I Care about Copyright Law
The failure rate of entrepreneurship is high, and I have enough trouble bumbling through learning how to run my own business. This crony capitalism makes it harder for me as an independent game developer.
There are new businesses taking advantage of the reality of the Internet. We like being able to take advantage of the ease of creation and distribution. Why do we have to worry about old businesses changing the laws in order to break what new technology allows so that they can continue their old scarcity-based business models? Why are they more important than the people starting new businesses and creating new jobs, especially in this economy?
When they cry that they are having existential dangers that need to be stopped while simultaneously reporting record profits year after year, why is the U.S. government saying that “online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs”? Who told them that? Where is the actual evidence? The Cato Institute analyzed the numbers presented by the MPAA, and it seems we have been conned.
And after all of the duplicitous, all of the lobbyist money buying regulations, laws and policies, and all of the chafing, I am supposed to expect that my potential customers will respect copyright law, no matter how absurd and one-sided it gets? I can’t make a living in a world where the major media companies get their way.
And they’re fine with that. Less competition for them.
And if the above didn’t convince you of the problems we’ll be facing in the coming years from the established media companies, this TED talk by Clay Shirky is a quick summary of the problems laws like the DMCA and SOPA/PIPA pose to small businesses and individual creators: