Firstly, let’s get this out of the way. When you pay for a game, you’re not actually paying for the copy of the game. In this digital world, a copy of the game is worthless. That’s because little to no labor went into making the copy of the game. So what are you actually paying for when you buy a copy of a game? You are repaying a fraction of the value of the game itself. Now the difference between “the game” and “a copy of the game” is that “the game” is not a physical or even a digital item. “The game” is the item that was created as it was developed. However, what capitalism does is make it impossible to get the labor of the game paid in full. Instead, it makes you pay for every (worthless) copy of the game. And that’s not even mentioning the surplus value that gets extracted from hardworking developers by greedy AAA companies. Socialism would solve these issues. Instead of having to release the game and then rolling the demand dice to decide what percentage of your labor gets compensated, your labor could get compensated in full as the game gets published. This is also good news for consumers, as now they can freely redistribute copies of the game without preventing labor from being compensated.
A software grant program pays to produce software, then releases it as open source. Have a modular system for the software so that modders can expand utility or cosmetic changes they need to the system. This can be applied to industrial software or gaming software. The software soviet can negotiate price or technical difficulties that change release time to have a proper dialectic with the public.
Digital artist soviets can can be commissioned to create the default art for games as open source. However individual commissions of mod art for games and release them for individuals if they want and require it to be open source it after a certain time period maybe a year. It is at the discussion of moderator soviets what mod art can be used for multiplayer games for practical reasons and reporting fascists.
Could this be? The start of Tool-Assisted PVP becoming mainstream?
I really like how the first effective glimpses of postscarcity we have in form of digital goods, fully confirmed Marx is still in game in such case.
i like this, but how?
?
i mean… how do you get paid up front for the full compensation? who would determine what that is?
Prolly through some sorta Creators’ Soviet or smthn
I believe the USSR had arts grants that would cover things like films and stuff, no reason to think that a socialist state couldn’t have a similar idea for games.
The best example is the 2003 Gearbox PC port of Halo Combat Evolved.
The port came with several downgrades compared to the original Xbox release, notably ruined textures and detail, transparent objects looking worse thanks to a file type known as
shader_transparent_genericnot working and replaced with a less advanced type known asshader_transparent_chicago, and broken AI. Worse yet Gearbox forgot to fix it to the point the PC port became the basis for the “classic” mode of Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary and its later MCC port. In fact, it took the MCC version of CEA until **SEASON 7 ** - seven years after MCC’s release and two years on PC - to restore these shaders and is now compatible with both Gearbox and Xbox graphics, all other versions of Combat Evolved except the original Xbox have these graphical issues to this day including the Gearbox portThanks to intellectual property law we folks in the Halo modding community couldn’t re-code the game to restore the Xbox graphics due to the source code locked behind intellectual “property” and are forced to use the Gearbox shaders just to “fix” them. Thankfully MCC CEA has both mod support and Xbox graphics but we now have a new problem where thousands of modded assets made for the broken PC port look outdated in comparison.
Addendum: This pointed out to me by a comrade of mine on 7:53 am here in the Philippines. Gearbox deliberately downgraded CE to run on less powerful machines but they should have fixed it in later patches down the line, especially when hardware became more powerful.
