80's, BABY! WOO!

Do you think the solution is government and/or private grants to artists? And if so, what if the government suppresses certain projects for political reasons? And where does the money for the private grants come from and how is it enough to support the sheer volume of media that people are used to?

Do you think the solution is a cultural shift away from those types of big projects that need funding and towards projects that can be done on the side as a hobby? And if so, do you not think that the end of “artist” as a profession would be bad for culture in general?

Do you think that all art should be free, or do you think people should have to pay for it? And if you think people should have to pay for it, why do you think that anyone would choose to pay when they could easily pirate it?

even assuming that all art gets put on the web to remove the expense of paper for books, discs for games, paint for paintings, etc: Servers cost money. Electricity costs money. Where is the money to host and provide this art coming from?

Sorry for the wall of text, I was just curious. I also don’t think the solution is: “people will choose to give artists money out of the kindness of their hearts” because that’s what the system already is now for artists who are publishing without any real copyright protection, and it is not producing enough art in the kinds that are needed to satisfy society. If it was, everyone would be playing pay-what-you-want indie games instead preordering gta 6

(noting ahead of time that i kind of ramble in different directions here and in no particular order! very long post.)

i'm not actually opposed to people making money off of their art, nor do i think copyright abolition would lead people to not make big projects like that. in fact i am going to make a chart for this:

this is how i imagine the current games ecosystem to look. the way you get a genre is if enough people copy each other enough to where you can look at a handful and define a common denominator; especially if it's named after a particular game, like roguelikes, metroidvanias, soulslikes, etc. it's all pretty much just people being inspired by each other, ad infinitum.

were we to not have rigid copyright laws, i would imagine the lines would blur a considerable amount, in-so-far that the skill in making the game itself would be a prioritized factor over the actual concepts there-in. more than anything, it would probably be social enforcement that keeps 1-to-1 ripoffs from getting a substantial amount of popularity, but if the ripoff plays better than the original, well... that's between the two creators.

i think, in terms of video games, what bothers me more than copyright are patents. the video game industry would be much better off without patents, because they're a huge part of what actually stifles new projects.

for those who are unaware (as i like these asks to be broadly accessible too), while copyright protects specific assets and creations, patents protect inventions. if you invent an entirely new mechanic, such as, oh, i don't know, minigames during loading screens, you can patent that, and anyone else who wants to implement that feature will have to pay you first. i mention minigames during loading screens because namco had the patent on that until 2015.

patents are also a huge part of how nintendo went after palworld, but not with existing patents—they specifically attempted to register NEW patents in order to stick palworld with them. nintendo registered capturing creatures with throwable objects, riding characters in virtual spaces, and seamlessly swapping between different types of mounts all as patents in response to palworld. nintendo even specifically registered the capture system, JP7545191, five months after palworld's early access release, and then sued pocketpair the month after it was approved!

notably, one of these patents was rejected: the monster capture mechanic, and to top it off, japan's patent office cited pokemon generations, a fanmade 3D pokemon game that was originally shown off in 2013, and well...

it has the exact same "you aim and throw an object at a creature with a percentage chance to catch it" mechanic that they were trying to patent.

this sort of derailed! as for your other questions, as i said, i do think it's fine to have people pay for art; moreso, i imagine that in a future without copyright law, there would be a wider variety of similar art that people could choose from, were they to be unable to pay for one specific work. and i do think people would still pay, but moreso because they're able to and they want to support the work of someone they like. it would be much more along the lines of donations than anything, if that makes sense?

coming from my own perspective as an ai artist, what determines whether i commission someone or generate my own piece (or heck, draw it manually) is predicated on a couple factors:

do i like the artistic vision of the person whose art i'm looking at? is it something new that i hadn't thought of myself?

do i like the person in question? not just as a friend; do i find them agreeable in general?

do i want to support them? are they in a rough position, and receiving a commission would help them?

have i commissioned them before already, and i liked the previous piece enough to come back for another?

do they already work on something i enjoy, to the point to where it would feel exciting to have my characters drawn in their style?

i will say that i am notoriously picky, so if i commission someone, it's maybe once or twice a year. but pretty much all of these factors have come into play at least once! and i think it would be naive to think that i'm the only one who would genuinely want to pay for a service even though i could get it for free elsewhere.

i see the assumption that people wouldn't want to financially support any artist without copyright as sort of, eh... pessimistic? i think the issue is moreso that there are so many indie projects out there that it's gonna be hard to support them all! you can only play so many games, read so many comics, people only have so much money. SEO plays a big part too; if you don't want to invest anything into advertising, well, you're really stuck with the audience you already have, which can be very small.

this is why the people who get the most attention are usually the people who know how to network and game the system. it's not just random! you have to become your own pr manager if you want to work up from the bottom by yourself, which is why i don't really mind if the amount of people who've played rem:overdrawn stays in the double digits. i'm not doing all that shit!!!

ultimately, i think "will people pay for art?" has a similar answer to "will people still work with UBI?" yes! because they already do it of their free will without being told to. someone paid $25 for rem:overdrawn the first day it came out! i didn't ask for that, but they did! a better world is possible. etc etc.

government grants are an interesting idea, but i would honestly set that aside until we actually have copyright abolition, because i'd want to know what the world looks like at that point before i start talking about getting the government involved. my ideal copyright-less world is also a world with UBI, to be fair! so it would hopefully just be up to determination and coordination to make bigger projects work, not having to figure out how you're going to eat at the same time.

as for the idea of everything being online, i kind of grimace at the idea of it. i like physical media! i like being able to hold something in my hands and own it for real, rather than having it be the idea of an object in pixel form. i would much rather there be advancements and overall societal betterment that allow for the physical things to exist without as much effect on the environment than to have everything be On The Web.

i don't think anything is going to stop artists from existing. artisan crafters still exist; we went to multiple arts festivals last year, and i bought a crapton of needling felt. people just like making art and materials for art! yeah, keeping sheep and spinning their wool is definitely outpaced by synthetic wool, but there were still a ton of people at each arts festival we went to. it's impressive work, it's a thoughtful gift for people who appreciate it, and it's a great way to get to know your community. same thing for anime conventions! they're not too many degrees separated from each other; artists come together to show their wares and talk to like-minded people.

I’m not claiming that no one will make or pay for art without ip law or a profit incentive. My claim is that there are specific kinds of art that a lot of people enjoy, which only exists because someone thought they could make a profit, and without ip law, those specific kinds of art will not be made frequently enough to satisfy most people. Best example of this is AAA video games. Yes the teams who make the games are passionate about them. But ultimately every AAA game exists because a suit somewhere thought it would make a bazillion dollars.

Now you might say “okay but AAA games suck, so no great loss there”. You might even say that “making a bazillion dollars” is not an incentive that produces good art. But it is an incentive that produces popular art. Because the only way to make a bazillion dollars is for a ton of people to like your game enough to pay a bunch of money for it. Without ip law, the studio makes a AAA, someone buys it and then starts giving away copies for free on the internet, and then a large chunk of the people— who didn’t really want to pay the asking price but would have paid if they didn’t have an alternative— download the free copy. The studio doesn’t make a bazillion dollars, every other studio sees this happen and realizes they also won’t make a bazillion dollars, and corporately-funded AAA games stop being produced. Or alternatively they switch to a different form of monetization such as pay-to-win, or Microtransaction Hell. Either way, millions of gamers are sad.

Now, yes, there is crowdfunding. But here is my picture of the gaming market.

(1) There are people who are happy playing free indie games forever and ever and might occasionally donate to the creators.

(2) There are people who will crowdfund games and are fine with the fact that crowdfunding produces AAA-shaped games maybe once every 5 years, and are fine with paying money and then waiting for years to get to play the game, assuming that it even gets finished and doesn’t fall apart after the lead dev or designer gets into a terrible accident.

(3) There are people who want a new AAA every year at a minimum, but really they want two or three per year, and their ideal price point is $25 but they’ll pay any price if they don’t have an alternative.

I think that most of the money and most of the people in the gaming market is in (3). Realistically, crowdfunding is not going to satisfy the demand of this group. They are not patient enough. And if they’re choosing how much to pay, most of them will not pay enough to keep the project funded for the length of time it takes to produce a AAA-shaped game

Also, switching from a corporate-funded to crowdfunded model means switching from people making games for mass appeal for money, to people making games because they had an idea. Which means that games get more niche, and also shorter, because it is seriously hard to think of a game idea that has a 60 hour or 80 hour story mode. And there’s no longer someone in charge who’s taking a bunch of game designers and putting them in a room together and telling them to think of something that long. Instead, most of the games will have been designed by one or two people, and no one is making them make AAA length games. So only a very few amount of 60 and 80 hour games will be produced.

also, the price to produce a game increases a lot the bigger the scope is. You need a bigger team, and you have to pay the team for more days. Look at how long gta6 was in production. If it was crowdfunded, they would have run out of money years ago. Only a large corporation that has hundreds of millions of dollars can afford this kind of thing. So there is now an active market pressure towards making shorter games.

So like… I guess we would see if the “I want to pay more money for shorter games” can put their money where their mouth is. But I don’t think that most people would be satisfied even if they could buy a AAA-shaped game for 20 bucks every once in a blue moon.

So yeah, in other sectors of the art market the specific forces are different, but I think overall no ip means no corporate-backed art, which means smaller, nicher projects being released less frequently; and less physical media that’s more expensive when it is produced because the creators don’t have access to the same economies of scale. Some people will be fine with the market moving in this direction, but we have to remember that the most profitable sector of the market has always been (for lack of a better word) normies. That’s who is spending most of the money.

Gladly!

A bit more complicated, but sure!

the life i have definitely never longed for, fuck you for even implying that

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

on a lighter note i would like everyone to see these frog enemies i made for the srpg studio game i've been toddling with. i didn't want to draw distinct enemies so these goobers it is. plus portrait

I was looking for eGPU enclosures. It wasn't encouraging. Reddit was right about this: You might as well buy a laptop and a PC. It's not worth the money. Since that Reddit post was written, things got worse. Docks that allow you to plug in an eGPU might as well not exist. The existing products are prohibitively expensive.

Why is that? It got me thinking. There are USB-3 docks with HDMI output, and there are docks with M.2 slots. There are even external SATA drive enclosures. Why not just sell the whole package in an ATX form factor? Why not put SATA and NVME and USB and PCI ports on an ATX-sized or ITX-sized motherboard, but without the CPU and RAM? Why not do that?

This way, you could re-use your old case and drives and power supply. You could save on everything except for the actual GPU. Then you put a clearly marked USB4 port on the rear I/O of the board, where rear I/O normally goes. That port also has USB-PD, and you plug in the laptop there, with a cable that can handle 100W.

It should be easy enough to make this a thing, with an ATX form factor and power supply. You could plug in front I/O and everything. You could use the SATA ports with your old CD drive.

You need somebody who

Is gamer enough to get a dedicated graphics card

Is space-conscious enough to avoid a regular desktop

Is technical enough to accept a non-standard solution

Is NOT gamer enough to get a big custom rig

Is NOT space conscious enough to just accept a gaming laptop

Is NOT so technical rig up an improvised solution on their own.

The venn diagram just seems like a small market!