Meanwhile I am playing a fan translation of a game that people made for free by people that will get nothing in return.
Bandai has never released the game in english because they don't think they'll make enough profit, despite fans urging them.
Passion and time is what creates things.
Profit hinders just as many things as it helps create.
Exactly. Games in general are a great example of this. The amount of work that goes into emulation, translations, mods all for no price is incredible and usually enhances what studios can't / won't do
KOTOR 2 restored content mod is just incredible. it was my first exposure to this phenomenon in a video game setting.
About 17 years ago, I taught myself how to make mods/map edits for Halo CE on my family's Mac. On regular Windows, the tools are more straightforward; on Mac, they were less intuitive, had much less documentation due to fewer people working on it, and were generally pretty eh; this was all also pre Youtube, or right at it's start, so...no helpful video guide. You had to use an archive invalidator to flag any map you wanted to edit as a 'demo' map before you could edit anything to fool some registry value into permitting the edits, and then had to remember to flip it back again once you were done with editing (it could also break sometimes for no apparent reason).
But I (and many other people) used it all anyway to make all manner of oddball things for the amusement of ourselves and others
Hell, the Marathon games before that came in the mid 90's with their own editing software (more accurately, Marathon Infinity did), and it was insanely complex. Shit was basically a bunch of numbers in a database that you could play around with to affect items (og Forge was the map editor and Anvil the scenario)
And that's just a very niche segment of gaming, there are so many broader examples all around us of people doing things, not out of want for profit, but for desire to improve the world, for their own pleasure or entertainment, etc.
Bottom line, if you earnestly believe that...I almost pity you (almost). Unable to think in things outside of terms such as money
The STALKER fandom is insane with this, there is just a straight up standalone version of the game now, ported to 64-bit architecture and mods of all kinds keep coming out despite the last release being 2009.
EDIT: To drive the point home, there's a sizeable subsection of the STALKER Fandom that hasn't actually played any of the original games
Hell, Team Fortress, DOTA, and Counter-Strike are maybe Valve's three largest franchises. 2 were free mods for half life originally, one was a custom Warcraft 3 map.
Balancing maps is hard, but something thread-related is how in Starcraft 1 & 2 the maps shift season to season and they're almost all made for free by fans of the game (at one point there were paid map makers, but that era of the game ended and unique maps are still getting made).
Yes. And then from that spawned the Call of Chernobyl mod, which stitched together every previous map, added some features and basically just lets you free roam the zone. Sort of "roleplay your own story" thing, allthough there is a new main quest if you want one. That required you own Call of Pripyat though, albeit I'm pretty sure mostly for licensing reasons.
And then from that spawned Stalker: Anomaly which is the standalone version of Call of Chernobyl, where the old-ass X-Ray Engine was ported to 64 bit. It adds a fair bit of features by itself, but then for that mod turned standalone version of the game there is, again, loads and loads of mods.
Be me, Mesopotamian King
Need a way to convince farmers to feed my soldiers
Give the soldiers shiny scraps of metal
Tell the farmers that if they don't give me back my metal circles at the end of the year I will kill them
:think-about-it:
I've always suspected that people who say "No one would create anything without profit motive" are just telling on themselves
similar to the people who say "if god didn't exist, then everyone would just rape and murder"
I like to respond with "I'm an atheist, so I rape and murder all I want, which is zero"
Cruel indifference of profit when the indomitable human passion walks in
There are two possibilities:
1) something is useful/necessary/desirable. if it's useful, people will make it regardless of profit because it inherently useful.
2) something is useless. if it's useless, people being motivated by profit to make it is a BAD thing.
Imo people to hype up the profit motive for art are acutely aware that artists fucking hate making a ton of the bland content that is made today (and they love consuming), and assume in a socialist society all art will be the deeper and more abstract stuff. The reality is probably we'll see more experimental stuff, but the majority will still be capeshit and dragonshit, just hopefully less soulless than at present.
Tl;dr: these people realize capitalism makes bad art but they just love bad art.
This whole site was made and is kept safe by unpaid nerds. Thanks folks <3
I don’t make anything without a profit motive because the only way for me to survive is to use all my energy on selling my commodified laborpower. I want to creative things without a profit motive but I’m just so tired
Games without profit motive would be fucking awesome.
- No microtransactions
- Less risk -> more innovation
- More "life's work" games like Dwarf Fortress
- More original IPs, less remakes and remasters
Makes me sad thinking about what could be :sadness:
If it cheers you up at all, the past 15 or so years have been the golden era of indie games. Before then you maybe had some flash games on newgrounds. And even before that playing an indie game meant knowing a person who knows someone who has a floppy disc. And before that? You had to know the programmer personally and also work in the same university lab they did
Not to say like "kids these days don't appreciate stuff" but I'm generally positive about games nowadays. Lots of people making smaller, cheap to free stuff and there's more of it than I'd ever have time to engage with
More original IPs, less remakes and remasters
Hell, people would be able to modify existing IPs and do something interesting with it. Valve is obviously capitalistic, but because they open their games up to people so many mods and spinoff stories have been made by fans that is rarely seen in most other mainstream IPs
profit is the enemy of real art and it poisons any true expression with suspicion
You can point to fan translations of anime creating the entire international market for anime. Literally started out as some people with some specialized tech getting their hands on some anime VHS tapes and adding in subtitles to pass around their local communities leading to the more widespread introduction in the early 00s with fan translations eclipsing any official products. Fan translations were not always the highest quality, but there was often high enough quality combined with speed that has left a lasting impact in both the way the industry had to adapt to not just get enthusiastic fans to outdo them, but also in how the working conditions are terrible and the pay is shit because the assumption is that everyone is just a passionate fan so they'll put up with it all. It's an interesting look at just how a profit motive is absolutely unnecessary because people just like doing something and end up creating a brand new market.
Fan translations are still at the cutting edge of international interest in anime, manga, and Japanese light novels, since there is so much more content than what gets an official translation.
Digimon World Re:Digitize Decode for the 3DS
Love my modded 3DS. Piracy is good folks.
I wonder if people who say that ever use Wikipedia. Probably not
But that’s not even a counter-point. The feds only started doing that after Wikipedia became popular
:rat-salute: To the fan translation of the NES "Sweet Home" that a hexbear dot net poster told me about months ago that I started playing but never finished.
I don’t blame you for not finishing. That game can be pretty damn difficult.
Yeah, its one of those things that I'm going to need to be in the proper headspace to give it the proper attention.
Really liked the enemy battle portraits, though. The "WORMS!" look especially wet.
