One of the things that surprised me during the
process of putting together
Secrets of the Game Business (coming to a
disreputable bookstore near you in March) was how few of
the developers who wrote articles or submitted to
interviews complained about the business practices of
their publishers. After all, while the situation inside
the industry may not be anywhere near as dire as
"conventional wisdom" would lead us to believe, I have
lived through a couple of horror stories myself, and I
expected most of my peers to have as well. But it
doesn't seem to be the case.
Maybe the lack of complaints is due to
self-selection: people who are extremely bitter about
the business are probably not interested in writing
about it. Or maybe it's because the people who worked on
the book tend to be established, successful folks, who
have an easier time of it than the masses trying to
break in. Or maybe they're just too busy with their own
work to worry about how other companies handle their
affairs.
Whatever the case, one fact remains: publishers stand
between the developers and the buyers on the value
chain. And whoever sits between my stomach and my meal
ticket holds a scary amount of power. Even in the best
of cases, each party in a business relationship should
be expected to act according to their best interests –
and the more unbalanced the relative strengths of the
parties, the more the relationship has a tendency to
look like the one between the lion and the T-bone.
With the never-ending consolidation of the publishing
sector, the number of viable outlets for a developer's
games keeps shrinking. Which is an invitation for abuse;
the closer you are to a monopoly, the less the invisible
hand of the market is able to deliver a good spanking if
you deserve one. Therefore, there is the very real
possibility that, whatever the true current state of
developer-publisher relationships, it might get worse.
Eat The Rich
The question, in this or any other industry, is what
(if anything) should be done to alleviate the problem.
Should we try to change the relationship or just leave
well enough alone? P.J. O'Rourke's whimsically titled
book Eat The Rich: A Treatise On Economics (ISBN:
0-87113-719-4) asks a bunch of related questions, but on
the macroeconomic scale: Where do wealth and success
come from? What is the ideal economic system? Or, in his
own words: "Why do some places prosper and thrive, while
others just suck?"
Eat The Rich is that most unusual beast, a
laugh-out-loud funny book about social science that
still teaches you something. A lot of somethings, to be
precise. Here's a quick sample:
"You buy stock because […] you think other people
will think this stock is worth more later than you think
it's worth now. Economists call this – in a rare example
of comprehensible economist terminology – the Greater
Fool Theory."
In about two years of research, the author visited
places such as Sweden, Hong Kong, Tanzania, Russia,
Albania, and Wall Street to see how they had evolved
their current dynamics and how well their systems work
for the people involved. (The book was published a few
years ago, so the data and the conclusions aren't all
quite up to date, especially where Wall Street is
concerned, but the essentials are still there.)
One caveat: the book was prepared with a great deal
of help from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think
thank whose economic positions are somewhat to the right
of Genghis Khan. Thus, I expected the book's conclusion
to be something like: "Blow up the government, except
the army, and everything will be fine." And that's sort
of what I got. The author's stated opinion of planned
economies brings to mind the words "Rush Limbaugh" and
"rabies". Not to mention the fact that he seems to think
we should all take Hong Kong's pre-reunification system
as our example, despite its astounding levels of
overcrowding and pollution, its status as a British
crown colony without any sort of democratic government,
and the fact that "only" 16% of its households lived in
extreme poverty.
But when he's not being overly dogmatic, O'Rourke
displays tremendous powers of analysis – and a knack for
unearthing the most unsettling stories.
The Stories
For example, if you think that Russia is the
textbook case of a transition from communism to
capitalism gone bad, wait until you read what O'Rourke
has to say about Albania, where the entire army has
deserted, the country's only railroad has been stolen
and sold for scrap, and the national pastimes are
gambling and blood feuds. When he asks a citizen of
Tirana why the looting has finally stopped in the
embattled capital after several years of chaos, the
response he gets is: "They were finished." And his last
image of the country is that of a father teaching his
daughter how to smoke. His four-year old
daughter.
Left-leaning societies get no easier treatment, of
course. The following story about an extremely expensive
museum devoted to a 17th century battleship
decries the folly of runaway government spending in
Sweden:
"The Vasa was, as a guidebook put it, 'the
mightiest royal warship of her times.' The Vasa's
wreck was discovered in 1956, and she was raised almost
intact after five years of work by diving crews. […]
However, the Vasa was launched on August 10, 1628,
sailed 1,400 yards, and sank like a brick. 'The
mightiest royal warship of her times' – her times being
August 10, 1628, from 4:30 until 5 in the afternoon."
O'Rourke is also perplexed by the fact that there
seems to be no reliable correlation between wealth and
happiness. He says that average Tanzanians, who are so
poor that they insulate their houses with mud – when
they can afford the water to make mud – seem to be as
content as any other people he has met. As long as the
government leaves them alone.
Don't Fix It, Whether It's
Broken Or Not?
After much research, O'Rourke has come to the
conclusion that it doesn't matter whether the intentions
of an overly interventionist government are good
(Sweden, Tanzania) or bad (Cuba): they will always fail
in the end. That may be true, although Sweden rates much
higher on my list of places to live than pure-bred
capitalist paradises like, say, Colombia or inner-city
Detroit. But his corollary, i.e., that a laissez-faire
system is preferable, stands on far less solid ground.
"Accepting the free market allows us to avoid the
political abuse and financial mismanagement inherent in
trying to design an economy that's fair."
Never mind the fact that Russia has a free market
now. No mismanagement or abuse there. Or at Wolrdcom
either.
"Economics is not zero sum. There is no fixed amount
of wealth. That is, if you have too many slices of
pizza, I don't have to eat the box. Your money does not
cause my poverty."
True, as long as I get tired of pizza at some point
and let you grab the leftovers. If I have an insatiable
hunger, keep stuffing Meat Lovers Specials down my
throat with one hand, and hold you at gunpoint with the
other, you'll be lucky to get that box. Ask John
Roth or Ken Lay when the rich are rich enough, and when
it's everyone else's turn to benefit. (The book was
written before the last year's financial scandals, so
the author can almost be forgiven for believing that
CEOs know what's good for us. Almost.)
I don't know about you, but I don't trust the rich
any more than the government. Especially since they have
a distressing tendency to be the same people. O'Rourke
himself says it's a bad idea to let the people with all
the money hold all the guns too, but he doesn't seem to
have noticed that it's exactly the way things work in
most Western countries.
The Lesson?
And in most industries as well, which brings us back
to our original problem: how do we make sure that we, as
developers, don't get the short end of the stick – or,
at the very least, that the stick is long enough for the
short end to provide a decent grip?
I won't pretend to have all the solutions, but I
strongly suspect that the more ways we have to sell our
games to consumers, the easier it will be to weed out
the crooks. Build an overpass over the guy standing
between you and the consumer, and his power suddenly
doesn't seem so formidable.
Of course, we don't have a nice blunt government at
our disposal to bludgeon Electronic Arts and Sony into
dozens of hungry little publishers outbidding each other
for our services. So we have to be subtle about it.
Here's what I suggest: buy a self-published game online,
or (if you can afford it) sign a development contract
with one of the smaller publishers that growing
production budgets are quickly driving out of business.
In other words, apply a little interventionism, free
market style.
Kind of like the best of both worlds.
