The (awesome) economics of open source (Opensource.com)

The other games are more in a mid-sized commercial game budget. I am certainly glad that the trend exists, and think it can produce better games, but I wouldn't file it under "AAA". I'm not really sure that this term is very meaningful though, as it's more relevant in terms of sales strategy than created works.

> Star Citizen
$45 "Pledge"? Not clear: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/squadron42#roadmap

> Pillars of Eternity as games of this type.
$30-$45 - https://store.steampowered.com/app/291650/Pillars_of_Eter...

So thanks for supporting my argument so concisely. You can't develop OpenSource AAA-gaming titles.

And this is just one type of copyright. There are also movies and to lesser extent books.

> None of those could have gone open source though because they rely on game engines which don't have open source licensing.
That's because engine developers also have to eat.

I don't think that's true. E.g. "Elite: Dangerous creator says crowdfunding covered less than one-quarter of its total cost" - most of the money came from the developers themselves, presumably as an investment they hoped to earn back through sales. (https://www.pcgamer.com/elite-dangerous-crowdfunding-cove...)

Pillars of Eternity made $4M through Kickstarter and seems to have taken about 3 years to develop, which would be enough to pay for maybe a dozen full-time developers. The credits show several times more people than that, so I doubt Kickstarter covered the majority of their costs.

Most large games seem to use crowdfunding mainly for market research and PR, so they can go to a traditional investor and demonstrate there is real interest and get the money they actually need. (Plus it helps the developer push back against investors meddling with their vision, since it was the developer's vision that got the backers excited, and annoying the backers is really bad PR.)

Star Citizen has made over $190M through crowdfunding (beating the (non-marketing) costs of the most expensive games ever made) but its funding model seems quite, um, unique, like how it sells a pack of virtual spaceships (for a game that's nowhere near finished) for $27,000. Players who've already spent thousands would be distraught if the game collapsed, so they'll spend another few hundred to support its continuing development, and then another, and another. That's not something that other games could (or, morally, should) copy.

Yes, there are some audiences willing to pay 2-4 millions for a game not yet made. Most of these are nostalgia plays, and it seems like the market is dropping.

For what we expect for a "blockbuster" game these days, the budget is more likely to resemble 20-40 millions. It's hard to imagine a non-gatekept system that could ensure that kind of return. Maybe it's a failure of imagination, or maybe it's completley acceptable that there might not be such games. I don't personally think they're really much better, myself.

Personally I think that for smaller creative works, the enemy is a complete lack of being noticed, rather than people preferring not to pay. And for the largest works, the enemy is often that the process of this much capital pre-allocated often leads to shallower works.

So I think it's not clear that we need this system, but I also don't think it's evil or wrong. I think the choice about "profiteering" vs "sharing" to use slanted terminology is a bit out balance lately, where it's presumed that restricting is generally the better path, when i think it varies. I think a cultural shift where sharing is given greater consideration would be the biggest potential upside. Secondarily copyright that lasted 25 years or similar would probably be a much better balance.

> There are many ways a company could publish a game and make money without copyright or DRM or anything else draconian.
Plenty of AAA games have no DRM, yet they are closed source and expensive.

As for "many ways" I don't really know a single one. Raising several tens of millions to develop a game is not easy even when you can sell it later.

Ditto for movies. It's even worse for them.

VICTORIAN MORALITY.

Read up a bit on Dickens. His reputation was helped by his "squeaky clean" image which he couldn't afford to endanger in Britain, but he pretty much walked out on his wife for a younger woman. So when he toured America with his "wife", she was actually his mistress.

(Read up on some British railway disaster, which nearly killed him - I think it was the boat train to Dover or such-like - and especially note his travelling companions. This accident nearly caused a scandal to break which would have ruined him.)

Cherchez la femme, as always ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol