[hresvelgr]

Games in this day and age ideally need generous government subsidy to be successful.

I feel we're a long way off universal basic income worldwide so at the very least, something like an artist's living wage provided by the government is a necessity to produce good independent video games. Most professional indie developers tend to survive rather than thrive, barely kept afloat by money from publishers who also have their own interests and influence which affect the final result.

There would be kinks to iron out in terms of who gets the wage and how it's kept and so on, but the funding really needs to come from an entity that is largely divorced from the "success" of the game. Bit of a pipe dream, but it's nice to think about.

[bhb916]

Quite the contrary, the world you envision isn't nice to think about at all. It's impractical, inefficient, wildly haphazard, and, worse than that, would produce the exact opposite of what you're looking for. The profit motive might not be aesthetically pleasing to you but it provides the vibrant indie marketplace we see today.

[hresvelgr]

My inspiration for the idea was VicScreen[1], an Australian Victorian state government agency that funds film and interactive media projects. In the past they have funded half of a project's development budget but I'm unsure of their procedures as of now. Cult of the Lamb[2] was partially subsidised by VicScreen as an example. There is a selection process but the money comes with few strings attached, mainly attribution.

> The profit motive might not be aesthetically pleasing to you but it provides the vibrant indie marketplace we see today.

At what cost? My main point, ignoring my objectionable proposal is that video games could use better patronage from actors that aren't entirely profit driven. Having spoken to indie developers myself, there is a palpable constant stress living proposal to proposal with their business hanging in the balance at all times. That may very well be the nature of the market and some might say, so be it. I feel removing that stress to perform would probably offer better results, but who knows.

I am idealistic and I don't think art should be subject to the same conditions as the average business because the inherent value proposal is intangible and varies wildly to all that experience it.

[1] https://vicscreen.vic.gov.au/

[2] https://www.cultofthelamb.com/

[jokethrowaway]

Art is a sort of enjoyable endeavour for the artist and I certainly wish I would be paid to paint or make a videogame - but the world has way too much art being produced and it doesn't need another one - so I can keep writing crap react app for 300k and my soul or make a game for 50k (or go indie and likely starve).

In particular I think fiat currency and inflation drives the industry to stupid investments trying to follow trends and make money before your cash loses value - and those stupid investments turn into bad work practices. It's no chance work quality keeps going down (we're on a downhill spiral in every sector, from construction to tech, if you ask me what I've seen in the past 20y).

Art, being the antithesis of working badly, dumbed down significant (modern art anyone?) and become just a vessel to store value, more than something good made by masters.

Something intangible like a game license, despite still being art, is caught between two fires and turns into the one hit the most.

Basic income won't solve anything, it will just make everything more expensive and will shift even more money into the hands of the government.

Until we get rid of governments (likely with a painful crash, after we collapse on our own, after a 50 years slow decline) the situation is not going to improve in any way.

[nottorp]

> Until we get rid of governments

Nice to see you taking the eco option. Without governments to provide health care, security and infrastructure the world population is sure to decline drastically and then the biosphere will rebuild itself.

[dumpsterlid]

yawn another libertarian blaming things on too much government.

I could sure use some more government right now cracking down on industries with oligopolies that feel no threat of consequence for completely undermining the quality of their products while raising prices.

Who says way too much art is being made? There are a dizzying array of video games outs there but there is still clearly plenty room for more.

The problem is the exploitive way we set up these industries. Right now we have most of the big game companies seemingly poised to try to fire all the bulk of their artists/employees in favor of ai and it goes going to fail spectacularly but the damage to human workers in the industry will be long lasting all the same.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

artists are a dime a dozen, I say this as someone who has been dating one for 12 years now.

[danaris]

...you think people primarily create indie games because of profit motive?

That seems to me to betray a deep misunderstanding of the nature of human creativity.

Games are an art medium. Humans will always create art, no matter what tangible rewards are possible.

Instituting a universal basic income, such that people can quit their soul-sucking jobs and still make enough money to pay for food, shelter, heat, etc, will absolutely create a huge boom in art of all kinds. That includes indie games.

[ImprobableTruth]

Why would you want it to be divorced from success? Seems like popularity/commercial success is the best measure of "being good" societally that we have for art.

People making art/games only for themselves is fine of course, but I don't see why society should subsidize it (as long as we have finite resources - beyond that everything goes of course).

[hresvelgr]

> Why would you want it to be divorced from success?

Because art is not inherently successful, and using commercial success as a metric on whether it's "good" is philistinism. Art that is "bad" is at the very least interesting in more than one dimension. I have come to appreciate art that to most would be off-putting because where it excels and interests me, it does so in such unique ways I would never expect. There's no telling where those seeds of ingenuity will grow to and who they will inspire.

We need "bad" art as much as we need "good" art.

[ImprobableTruth]

Commercially successful art is that which is "popular enough". The value of art is completely subjective, so what other measure do we have?

If there's "bad art" that appeals to you and others enough, then it isn't bad art. There's lots of art that critics and the general public would consider poorly made that is still commercially successful because it has its fans.

"Real" bad art is art that almost no one cares for enough to shell out money. Why should we subsidize that? Just writing this off as philistinism isn't convincing in the least.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

It's not clear to me how you can say that in good faith.

There are just too many instances of artists who died destitute only to be considered one of the greats many years after the fact.

And the ones that didn't were bankrolled by a wealthy individual.

thirdly, many artists draw things they don't really want to because that thing sells better than what they enjoy drawing. It's optimizing for a different thing than what the other poster is claiming should be optimized for.

[ImprobableTruth]

Because what other good measure is there?

You mention great artists who died destitute - but we consider them great because they are posthumously popular. We can't look into the future to see what stands the test of time, so current popularity and commercial success seem like the best proxies.

>thirdly, many artists draw things they don't really want to because that thing sells better than what they enjoy drawing. It's optimizing for a different thing than what the other poster is claiming should be optimized for.

Since the proposal isn't about UBI in general, why should we care about artists in particular? Many (most?) people work jobs where they do things they don't really want to because it's more useful to others than what they'd actually like to do.

[danaris]

We place a great cultural value on art.

Bear in mind that "art" is not just "paintings and poems". Novels are art. Movies and television shows are art. Music (of all types) is art. Games, indeed, are art.

Basically anything that you might turn to for entertainment and aesthetic pleasure is art, and as humans we need it in our lives—both consuming and, in a great many cases, creating.

But many forms of art have always been commercially non-viable. Many if not most of the best-known painters and sculptors from times past fell into one of two categories: those who had wealthy patrons, and those who died destitute.

Why should we say that only those artists whose work meets some arbitrary standard of commercial success are allowed to create art without spending most of their waking hours doing something else, or else having to constantly worry whether they'll be able to live to see another year?

[ImprobableTruth]

Because we don't live in a world with UBI, so we have to decide how to allocate finite resources. The alternative to using some arbitrary standard of commercial success is some other arbitrary standard (unless you introduce UBI).

If we want to optimize for enrichment of people's lives through art, "how many people are willing to pay for it" seems like the best proxy we have. Not to mention that people with some financial success will be less costly to subsidize.

Like, if I had to choose between subsidizing two musicians projected to make half of living wage and a single musician earning nothing, to me that's a pretty obvious choice. The musician earning nothing might be a true visionary who will be recognized in the future, but the odds are far more likely that the music they produce just doesn't hold much appeal.

Now, commercial success is of course not a perfect measure for "enrichment", but, again, what's the alternative? Currently it's some government body deciding, though this holds the quite elitist assumption that the taste of the art establishment is better.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

There's a common complaint you'll see about google.

They hired the brightest minds of our generation ... to work on ads rather than the betterment of humanity.

You're saying artists should optimize for money, the other poster is saying they should optimize for fulfillment.

The output you get from one vs the other is vastly different because the underlying incentives are vastly different.

> Because what other good measure is there?

Why does there need to _be_ a good measure?

Do we have a good measure for sex? is it length of time, size of organs, number of orgasms, how deeply the participants care about each other?

Why can't something just simply be?

[ImprobableTruth]

Unless you go for UBI, art subsidies will be finite. You need a measure to decide who gets subsidized and who doesn't. We're not talking about people doing art as a hobby after all, but about the government paying people to make art.

I'm not saying artists should optimize for money but financial sustainability. It seems like a good target because it indicates popularity and means you need less subsidies. You don't need to make _all_ the money or even break even, but if nobody is interested in paying you, the odds are good that you're not enriching many peoples lives.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

financial stability is a different word for money.

no one is saying the government needs to specifically pay for art, the original discussion was about how to determine the worth of art. You think money is the right proxy, the other poster thinks fulfillment is the right proxy.

yes the other poster was hinting at UBI and using artists as a proxy for people being able to work on what they find interesting. you strawmanned that into an argument that governments are being asked to specifically pay for art.

[bidder33]

the “kinks to work out” is a funny way of saying “gaping holes that make this idea completely unworkable”

and given the endless stream of indie games government funding doesn’t seem to be a necessity.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

> Games in this day and age ideally need generous government subsidy to be successful.

Like buying everyone in the CCP a copy of FTL: Faster Than Light? (Apparently the team behind FTL was operating out of Shanghai.)

[spacemarine1]

Government subsidies are a wonderful source of pre publisher funds but in many places (like the US) they don’t really exist for video games.