My dad owns a toolshop in america, runs it out of our garage, it's companies he gets jobs from that are getting finicky, I keep telling him to get them to sign a contract or to send them an invoice before he does any work for them, he doesn't listen and ends up with companies telling him they don't need the parts anyways. he still gets a few jobs that do pay but not as many as he could.
Back onto games, yeah, it's the whole capitalist thing, a 'capitalist' is a person who uses money to buy labor, the labor creates the profits and the capitalist typically pays them their individual profit excluding the surplus.
if a person works for themselves they get the surplus as well as general profits, if you work for a capitalist, they in effect steal the surplus that you earned.
This is all coming to another video-game crash not too far from now.
when videogames first started as a commercial product they were made by individuals, some of these individuals failed, others succeeded and have now become capitalists, these capitalists encountered and defeated one video-game crash already and believe that corporate game design is what caused them to defeat it. the ability of a corporation to limit individuals from publishing games is said to streamline quality. in the early days quality was as easy as "does it work?" now days however it's obvious that 'videogame quality' is becoming increasingly more elaborate and dependent entirely on the ideas behind the game.
When challenged with this new problem companies abandoned the old design system where executives and directors came up with the designs and the employees made them, to a new system called the 'agile process' where the executives and directors barely do anything and the video game team comes up with ideas and throws them together into one big melting pot and then slowly makes each idea into fruition. They claim this system maximizes 'quality' to the most of it's possible potential.
What they fail to realize however is that many different people have many different ideas and NO SINGLE video-game team will ever come up with ALL POSSIBLE IDEAS, what that boils down to is the phrase that videogame companies should live by "It can always be done better". instead the agile process spawns a 'lock-out' system to people with potentially better ideas, and produces certain assurances and favoritism to the development team who then assume their ideas are the best possible quality ideas, from where game-play is subtracted for the sake of weird dreams and crazy ideas that the team had, and of course the favoritism on their behalf spawns a tendency to be lazy.
the outcome? game-play quality declines, the executives loose money but stick up for it anyways, cause it would be shameful to admit they placed favoritism on these teams that failed so epically. So what happens after that? nothing, the execs stick up for their team until they have no finances to safely run those projects anymore, then; Sunset and Pink-slips.
obviously there are good developers who are more than pulling their own weight, like Posi, thing is the corporate mind acts indiscriminately in many cases, they view the team as one whole entity, the weak links sabotage the entire thing.
So whats my prediction for the future? At Home Indie Developers will lead the industry and in many ways already are. However, there is still a lot of favoritism even amongst these indie developers, that will be weeded out. and many indies are making the mistake of taking on a corporate system for their business structure.
Right now there is very little support for indie Devs save the public themselves, there are stiff barricades set up to deter indie developers from A: getting any experience, and B: starting up their own game title to be published for anything other than Computer.
it's an uphill battle through companies that are dangling on strings while avoiding the companies that are falling, I use this metaphor in more ways than 1. companies that make stupid ideas and fail epically may use part of your idea, thus making your idea look bad even though it's a different entity and may function better. So it's imperative for indie devs to keep an eye on what current games are doing, recognize disasters and avoid looking like them.
Honestly it's more like escaping from Ganon's tower or planet zebes before the explosion, bits and pieces that are large companies or parts of them are falling everywhere, yes, the tower/zebes will eventually be completely destroyed (all those businesses will fall to ruin) other developers need to work hard to get out of there before the fall or at least be able to climb out of the ashes. Yeah a few corporate Gannons will survive and learn from the heroes "how to pick themselves up" according to new models, but they will reject parts of new models that don't suit their corporate high profit agendas and will ultimately be defeated by the heroes.
Sealed away, until their next evil corporate money grubbing ways find some way to get back into things. a sad cycle.
