Tencent has like a 40% stake in Epic & Epic has been part of a Disney “accelerator program” (lol) for like four years straight so they’ve def got uhhh obligations
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Definitely not! It’s the same limited opportunity that you have to chase to survive as a small creator. And it stinks and I’ve run that race for years. And you’re absolutely right that it only exists for a short while because it’s useful to the big companies.
I don’t like assigning judgment to these companies because I think that so much of this occurs independently of the store and platform actors, and it applies very similarly to almost all information products – news, film, television, etc.
What was choking off small creators in the old world?
- Box-store distribution required scale to negotiate shelf space. New markets like young PC games and new consoles allowed space for small creators, but as they matured everything consolidated and became more risk-averse. The console & PC games industry between 2000-2010 was in dire straits in an ossified market.
What happened?
- Digital distribution allowed small actors to distribute & sell. This removed the main blocker from small creators reaching customers.
- Digital content can be replicated at no cost, so there’s no inherent price floor.
Because of this:
- Selling is no longer about being large enough or part of a large enough group to earn shelf space, but is about independently creating attention.
- Along with very good, free tool support, game development has finally become accessible and commoditized. The world is flooded with games.
- Attention becomes the most important criteria. Attention is bimodally distributed: far more tilted towards the biggest than the shelf-world we had before, but with a far longer tail allowing for more breakout small hits. Importantly! this is still far too risky and random to small creators to survive on anything but borrowed time and money.
It’s a world better than what was possible when I entered school but as these digital markets mature, when we don’t have new tech! just for the sake of it, it gets harder as the bigger companies suck up all the oxygen.
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In other words, I think both the market is working better at creating opportunity for smaller creators and it is not stable.
Futures where people can stably create what they want will solve a lot of anxieties but not solve the audience/attention problems.
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sure seems curious that things remain frustrating for people who are exactly my age as they change in other ways
I go back and forth on this personally as a creator but
the audience/attention problems are one of the most indisputably direct reasons why people can’t stably create what they want, and it’s been that way for a really long time
the instability of the market is precisely why smaller creators can’t create? I honestly don’t get that evaluation at all
it just reads like austerity for creatives and the only solutions I’ve ever really been able to imagine as something I’m willing to buy into are those that decommodify creative work, and one of the easiest and most prevalent ways to commodify creative work is to tie it to the number of people that have seen or heard of it? that’s literally why spotify is so bad
to clarify, it’s why they can’t live off it
it’s madness to work on an indie project without getting paid, assuming game revenue in a few years will make it up
even subscription pools, direct consumer models like Patreon, and, to a certain amount, government grants work this way, of course; the popular things are given future opportunities, the dusty ignored ones are kicked in favor of new faces hoping for a shot. Popularity is important in patronage systems, too!
it’s almost like “secure union gig that gets out of the way for exciting projects” is the actual best model 
like studio film crews that can react to varying time commitments by role?
it’s interesting to think about how well game studios actually fill work for engineers and artists and designers over an entire 3+ year project, because it’s undoubtedly distorted to fill that. Of course that’s mostly a lie, the reliance (increasingly) on short-term contractors to fill out the last year and a half of a project is very similar to film crew structure and is just a gaping hole asking for a strong union.
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I think I know what I’m misunderstanding now
I don’t think people should need to make a living off creative work, I think lives should be stable enough so that they can pursue creative work without worrying about making ends meet AND without the expectation that their creative work needs to hold up to a certain standard, economical or otherwise
but this requires a reevaluation of work and creativity and this and that and I don’t think epic or spotify or any of these big platforms hosting large amounts of media represents something I’d look favorably on, mostly because the kind of mythmaking big media hosting platforms do as a result of their hosting large amounts of content actively contributes to the idea that in order to pursue creative work full time you must make a living off it, otherwise you should work some other job and not attempt to make your creative work a Thing at all
so I guess what I’m reacting to is the model of creativity AND work that epic by virtue of being a benevolent marketplace is putting forth and I don’t like it
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Hear hear
It’s just so far removed from any world people who want to make things right now can do and it implies such a larger societal change that I start these discussions by assuming the world we live in and how the current actors are reacting to it/shaping it
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The SRW on PS2 without the Gundams is in english now
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Really pulling for them
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But plenty of Huckebeins!
a previously unknown, and completely bizarre-looking simpsons dreamcast game has been discovered!
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Looks like a demo built to show off the graphic engine vs an actual planned game, which explains why you’re a bug and not like any character from the Simpsons.
eta: a Mr. Mosquito clone but you’re the regular-sized Bumble Bee Man.
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get fucked shiggysama
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those are arguably not warp pipes, but just regular pipes. well i don’t know about the mario party one.
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