Lastly, he has no real answers. His videos are just a revolving door of the issue but never a solution. I know he references some faggy "co-op game publishing" concept in this video then trots away from it to show images of guys throwing money around. But it would be legitimately interesting to have him look into these ideas if not for a fresh topic. But we all know it would just devolve to him whining and showing more dumb stock footage purchased from a company that takes a cut of the transaction to pay an executive.
He's probably talking about co-operative development houses, which have been successful with relatively small, indie projects in the past. But these solutions just don't scale up very well. Like, at all. (I'm going to paraphrase an old post here.)
That system works just fine for small projects. That's how most indie games are made, even if they don't use the pretentious labels: the entire group has input on the game and a financial stake on it. The biggest differences from what you'd normally expect from a standard dev team are that everybody is paid the same no matter their position, and
in theory the project doesn't have a Lead Developer. There may be someone with the title for PR purposes, but ideally all the aspects of the project are discussed by the entire team and voted on.
I say
ideally, because as with basically every "anarchist" system ever a hierarchy quickly forms and someone's opinion ends up swaying the others' and they take unofficial lead of the project. It's usually not a problem with very small teams, but as things go larger the system breaks down. Take
Dead Cells' developer, for example (emphasis mine):
Motion Twin is run as an
anarcho-syndicalist workers cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members. As part of the legal model, Motion Twin is required to pass a set percentage of its profits to its workers. In August 2019, Motion Twin spun off a new studio, Evil Empire, composed of Dead Cells developers who wanted to continue its development while Motion Twin moved to a new project. Evil Empire is run by Motion Twin's former head of marketing and is not run as a cooperative,
particularly because the company wanted to scale beyond ten employees. Motion Twin continues to participate in Dead Cells decisions.
They know that management style works fine for small projects, but if they want to bring in more people they need to set up a proper corporate structure. And that's where Jim's autistic screeching about capitalism runs face-first into the harsh realities of management: businesses and corporations aren't structured the way they are, with hierarchies, departments and different pay grades, simply because "muh capitalism". Labor is divided and managers appointed because
that's how shit gets done.
Here's an example my geography teacher in high school liked to use: the
Pyramids of Giza.
These things weren't built for profit. In fact, they were a massive sink for the government's tax revenue. Some people even speculate they operated as a way to redistribute wealth and create jobs when the Nile was flooded and farmers were out of work. And there's good evidence that the workers were well-fed and paid a reasonable wage for their work. These monuments were built
literally thousands of years before the concept of capitalism was even codified. And guess what? The workers were split into work teams, the teams had leaders, they all carried out different tasks, they all reported to officers (managers), and it was all done under the watch of an overseer (possibly an architect) in charge of the entire operation. And if you didn't work, or if your work was subpar,
you got thrown out.
Why? Because the purpose of an enterprise is
to get shit done. Whether that shit is "making ass-loads of money" or "building the world's most bangin' headstone", the principles of operation are the same.
Our societal structures have become vast and much more complex than they once were. A janitor can be 10 or more steps apart from the CEO, even assuming he's not outsourced from a cleaning company. But the basic principles that guide the coordination of large groups of people to get shit done haven't changed. This isn't capitalism, no matter how smoothbrained morons like Jim like to claim, it's just being efficient. Even all the failed "workers paradises" through history learned the hard way the only way they could get shit done was to set up hierarchies and give people at the top additional rewards to go along with the additional duties and responsibilities attached to their their role.
To wheel this back to videogames, Jim's
supposed field of expertise, you're not going to release a triple-A game with a triple-A budget, triple-A graphics, triple-A story, and triple-A marketing, with a co-op development model. You're just not. Now, if Jim wants to argue that we need more daring, experimental Indie releases that can be allowed to fail on their own without breaking the market, and fewer bloated, safe and corporate triple-A sequel-a-thons; then we can talk about it. But I question whether he'd have the attention span to even voice a nuanced thought like that before he inevitably slid back into "muh capitalism" or "uwu im such a girl now".
