I’m not saying it’s right, and I’m not defending the Zynga/Epic/EA types, but lots of salaried people work 60-hour weeks. Heck, lots of hourly employees work 60-hour weeks, and they do it by working two or more jobs for minimum wage. People who make games for a living, and coders in general, have good pay, incredible job portability and the opportunity to go freelance or indie if they don’t like working for “the man.” Compared to the other 99% of the workforce they have it pretty good. The idea that the pressure to price games under $5 somehow results in below-living-wage pay or sweatshop conditions for programmers is absurd.
I agree with your dislike of IAP, but let’s face it, the consumer has unequivocally made it clear that they hate paying upfront for apps. So, outside of certain niche markets, asking companies to conform to our desires is tantamount to demanding they commit economic suicide.
Sad, but it’s pretty universal. Anything that creates a lower price is going to be popular and generally going to become the market leader, no matter how destructive. Cheap beats everything.
You are, of course, correct. But do realize that if remuneration in the industry isn’t at least comparable to job opportunities elsewhere (less at least something for the “coolness” factor of working in the industry), then smart capable coders will seek employment elsewhere.
After all, if the median game returns $1,000 in revenue, then you’re going to go broke if it takes more than a week’s worth of time to make a game, including artwork. So you go cheap - you can’t afford innovation, you can’t afford anything except the bare minimum to get a game out fast.
Essentially the Walmart principle. Cheap drives out quality. And that’s pretty much happened to the Andoid market place (albeit with lots of exceptions) and is happening to the iOS marketplace.
Of course, perhaps we can rely on an endless stream of intelligent idiots to invest and lose $50K of their time and money creating games that have essentially no hope of recovering their costs. But I prefer the industry I enjoy not basically rely on exploiting the young and uninformed.
Ah, if the argument is that the demand for low priced games negatively impacts quality, I’ll give you that. But just like walmart set expectations of low prices for (generally) poor quality goods, and the market responded by creating another class of market specifically for higher-quality goods like artisan pickles and organic produce, I’d say the indie games scene has been thriving and there are still high quality games being made. Maybe they don’t start on the app stores because it’s too much of a crap shoot to get noticed, but once established they do show up there and make a boat-load.
Actually, I’m not worried about there being the occasional hit. People often look at 2-3 run-away successes each year and say the industry is just fine. And I don’t think that will change.
However, for me, a healthy industry is not essentially a lottery where you’re hoping for the stars to shine just right (on a decent product, naturally). An industry where 98% of the players are losing money is not particularly sustainable (unless you keep exploiting a new generation of innocents each time), nor is it good for the participants.
I far prefer an industry where hundreds, if not thousands actually make a decent living as opposed to a few millionaires and thousands of paupers. And to be honest, the numbers there keep going down, especially if the design is not amenable to making there money via IAP. I’ll be impressed when there’s a list of 1,000 independent games each year that made their production costs back (assuming an industry-reasonable wage for their creators). After all, looking at another industry, that was probably true for 10,000 books each year (at least until the last decade or two).
Of course, what I prefer is pretty much irrelevant. Economic trends march on.
But I’m often amazed at how people can decry the phenomena in one field, but as soon as it may personally save them a few bucks today, they’re big fans of it. It’s amazing how many people here hate Walmart, but are all for Amazon, which has about the same effect on the health of its suppliers. I can see liking both, or hating both, but the dichotomy of hating one and loving the other is pretty odd unless the criteria is “saves me money is good, saves other people money is bad”.
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