So I am in an odd place...
I adhere wholly to the libertarian viewpoint that "IP" is actually an unethical state monopoly, but I am an entrepreneur in an industry (videogames) where it's tough to find people who agree, and even harder to convince them that this is a sustainable practice. This presents both an interesting challenge and an enormous opportunity.
I am well aware of the opportunities that opening up software and content provides for innovation and civilization, and I know already of quite a few ways to make money without a decades-long state-ensured monopoly on content, but I thought I'd ask you all what ideas you have. Maybe they will also help me convince my development team to move forward in this direction...
So I open it up to all of you...how can an interested entrepreneur earn some revenue on a game without resorting to copyright, software patents, restrictive noncommercial licenses, or other forms of coercion?
read these
http://blog.mises.org/1771/intellectual-property-at-mises-org/
My Blog: http://www.anarchico.net/
Production is 'anarchistic' - Ludwig von Mises
vagrantpostman: So I open it up to all of you...how can an interested entrepreneur earn some revenue on a game without resorting to copyright, software patents, restrictive noncommercial licenses, or other forms of coercion?
Instead of paying money to buy a game, you pay money to play it online on the best servers. Right now I would love to play Modern Warfare 2 (a first person shooter) on dedicated servers with highly configurable battles and regularly having new maps out. This way, developers compete as a whole platform.
Some ways I thought of just off the top of my head:
- Ads (look at flash games, people can play those for free, and there are tons of clones, but most of the time the originals are vastly superior to the clones)
- Donations (look at Dwarf Fortress, he just gives you epic ASCII art stories)
- Offering immortalitiy (people who donate $20 get their names in the game/credits, get an item named after them, get an NPC in the game, etc.)
- Encryption: Could be viable, look at Minecraft. All the code is encrypted, sure some people pirate it and just play it for free, but a whole bunch of people love the game so much that they bought the legitimate copy (as with most games released).
- Delivering it to the customer in a way that is better than the competition (for example having your game on Steam).
Let us say your game is called "BestGameEver" and someone copied the exact thing and named it "BestGaemEVAR". Steam would be in the business of having only the official/original "BestGameEver" on their service, something that "BestGaemEVAR" cannot have.
- In the case of MMOs (and even games like Farmville) you could have people pay for little extra content. Take a look at the Asian F2P models, they are masters at free games with little extras people can buy (hats, hair, clothing, blah blah blah).
- With the Asian F2P models, let us say your competitor tries to get people to use credit cards to buy little extras, you will have a (hopefully) reputable name behind you. Your reputation will make people more likely to buy content from you, than from the company 'CopyGamesIsWhatWeDo".
The only way that I can think of to earn money on all art is through donations or ads. Either upfront donations (for example if people donate to you 100000USD in total you will release your art for all for free) or/and after art release with some bonus for all that donated at any time. Great thing about free games is they need little to no marketing - word spreads fast if they are any good. Also open source tends to attract people that will work for you for free if what you are doing has some interest to them - programmers, modders, graphic designers etc - they do it for fun and to get their name on credit list.
- donations can work out quite well
- offering support, bugfixes, etc. to the paying customers first
- with MMOs, have the best servers around (most stable, best NPCs, best plots, etc) - the first one is likely to get the largest userbase anyway, then it's a matter of keeping the advantage and keep building on it
- anyone can begin to play, those paying get something extra from the start
- make money of publishing hints, tweaks and cheats - noboody knows them before the developer
Check also this article for 'Eight Generatives Better Than Free'. Says very nicely what you have to look for.
Mises Wiki | Economic Resources and Books (search engine)
Peter Sidor: Check also this article for 'Eight Generatives Better Than Free'. Says very nicely what you have to look for.
That's excellent.
Excellent ideas, all.
Regarding the server, my idea is as follows (sorry if i get too technical here):
But this gives us the best of both worlds. The user has some control over how he connects and what information he's sending, but the server is centralized and big. But we still don't have to pay as much for upkeep.
The support idea is good too; I thought of that, especially since we're using a custom engine. We can sell our various services to people who want to use our engine to develop new games and (especially) mods, since that's our primary fanbase right now anyway.
And re: the article link, I'd say it's right on the money. I read on someone's blog that vegas makes all it's money from the top 10% of customers, and that games are becoming the same way. So it's important to offer more personalization and stability as these things will matter to your die-hard fans: your primary source of revenue in the first place.
With this approach, to say nothing of moral considerations, we should gain more exposure as a company and get a tremendous advantage in the construction and updating of our source code whenever we decide to release it unencrypted, since open source tends to work much faster than a small team of developers even for projects of minor notability.
This has already been widely recognized and that is why video games have strongly shifted toward MMO. However, even an MMO server can be spoofed. Early online shooter games had unofficial servers lacking serial checks. There are now unofficial servers for World of Warcraft.