“Greed is eternal”

– The ferengi rules of acquisition

Think of the four people you know best you are of working age. write down their names now.

Think about what they do for a living. How many of these people work for themselves, and how many work for someone else? How many work for a company with more than one hundred employees?

I suspect that a LOT of them work for those big companies, and it’s a possibility you work for one too. I used to. In fact I worked for a company with 66,000 staff once. Big companies are every effective, they can do things small companies can’t, but as we see more and more mergers and takeovers (especially in finance) I think we are seeing the downside of the big company society.

Whenever I read a new story about games companies releasing an expansion pack, downloadable content, micro-transactions, advertising or anything like that, someone always mentions ‘greed‘. News stories about games companies are often ‘tagged as ‘greed‘. Now I’m not going to defend some of the corporate bullshit we see in this industry, but I’m wary of this growing trend to equate all companies and everything they do with ‘greed‘.

In a sense, greed is being redefined as any move designed to make money. This is mad. Making money is what companies do. Cliff Harris is a game designer who loves making games, but Positech Games is a company that exists to make money. If Positech fails, Cliff can’t make the games. OF COURSE Positech tries to make money.

The reason that i think a lot of people are equating all business, all sales techniques, and all companies as greedy, is that increasingly people have no contact with people who own and run companies. The owners are seen as faceless ‘shareholders’ who are often assumed to be millionaires in flash houses. (The vast majority of shares are held by pension funds held by ordinary people) People assume that there is a justifiable ‘them and us’ mentality between the ordinary folk (us) and the evil swine who own companies or (Shock horror!) copyrights.

Small businesses act as a buffer between the excesses of the evil mega-corps and the general population. Big businesses can’t be *too* evil or the small ones will get a competitive advantage by being nicer. EA can only go so far with DRM before Positech and Stardock make them look like gits. Big business can lead to monopoly and a lack of choice and price competition too. Small businesses serve those niches that the big boys can’t be bothered with. Even if you only buy food from WalMart and games from EA, *You* benefit from the existence of Positech, Stardock and Introversion. We are the guys keeping the big guys (relatively) honest. Nobody knows where the next google or facebook is coming from, and this keeps those big guys in tune with the market, and not totally driving the consumer nuts.

Lets hear it for the little guys, and lets try and remember that not all companies are evil, not all adverts are the spawn of satan, not all games prices or expansion packs or DLC is some evil greedy capitalist scheme. At the end of the day, everyone is just trying to pay the bills. Sometimes, if it seems like I’m just trying to sell you something, it’s because I am. That’s what I do to put food on the table. It doesn’t mean I don’t love what I do, or try and do it well.

I’m 7 days away from releasing my new game, and the list of stuff to do is a bit grim. I keep making silly mistakes, like giving people the wrong version of files, and then doing it again,

It’s like crunch time, but being the only person who has to do everything. Arggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

If you look at a publishing contract, there are pages and pages of legalese bullshit. 99% of it is the same crap you get in all of them, which 99% of the time is totally irrelevant in practice. it has to be there, so both sides are happy but it’s not a practical problem.

This is stuff such as “you didn’t rip this game off anyone else” and “we have right to use name of the game to market the game” etc. Unless you are dealing with satan, a lot of games publishing contracts for on-line are very similar.

And then there is the vital stuff such as:

What royalty you get per copy sold

What the deductions can be

When you get paid.

Those 3 lines pretty much sum up the haggling of games contracts. It matters a BIG DEAL how much royalty you get. Some websites reckon they are doing you a favour to offer you 40% (yeah right, fuck off, I don’t need you, but you need games). Some pay a lot more, some pay a huge amount.  Some have a nebulous definition of deductions. And many of them assume you will take whatever is offered (think again).

I’m about to contact a few on-line portals to sell Kudos 2 through, alongside my own site. Of course, I REALLY want people to buy the game direct, because I make the biggest cut that way, but some people are so used to buying from certain other sites it’s tough to tempt them away. Generally, I make about 50/50 from my site and from everyone else. If it started skewing too far towards other people, I’d panic. I want to earn money to pay MY rent, not everyone else’s.

Here’s a last reminder for anyone who hasn’t heard it before:

“IF YOU DO NOT SELL YOUR GAME AT LEAST PARTIALLY DIRECT FROM YOUR WEBSITE YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST THROW A PILE OF MONEY IN THE FIRE”