The Indie Paradox: Paying Rent Without Depending On Corporations

Piracy happens for two reasons: people don’t have a lot of money, and 90% of everything is crap (or DRM’d, but that makes it crap). Therefore, by getting everything free, you won’t lose any of your hard-earned cash on that 90%. Unfortunately, because no money is going to the creators of the other 10%, they won’t continue making things for everyone to download free.

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Part of the admission process is defining what exactly the problem is, so let’s do that now:

• Indie creators need money
• People seem to prefer downloading stuff for free
• If your money comes from ads, you are a slave to the advertisers

Video games are seemingly the easiest medium to solve this for, but the proposed solutions only work for specific cases. I thought about the approach brought up by Dimerocker (as of writing, their site consists entirely of an unmutable coming-soon video with bad techno music, so don’t click) near the end of the Kotaku piece. Asia has dealt with this problem, and the most popular games there are free-to-play with premium components which you can get for micropayments. Piracy is impossible because the games have to be played on the web. This is great for MMO, arcade, and proceduralist games. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for games disinterested in replay value. Some narrative or art games are meant to be played once, and would not benefit from premium items or costumes or levels. For the same reason, this is no way to make a profit from movies.

But a video game business model which could potentially work for other mediums is a revival of the traditional arcade. Imagine a game in which you could play the first level, and every level after that cost 25 cents. It would be browser-based, or otherwise require an Internet connection, and every level you purchase is accessible to you forever. You can save your game, stop playing, pick it up later as normal, and only pay more when you progress to a new “chapter.” This could be applied to movies and books as well, allowing you to pay by the chapter (in the novel or DVD sense) after getting an initial, free teaser.

Anyone reading this is free to try that out, and I hope it works for you, but I still see problems. Presumably a large service would offer this, so what if such a service were to go offline, temporarily or permanently? Not only would that anger customers, whose purchased movies, books, and games are now inaccessible, but creators, who were dependant on the service for their money. Also, the service would be free to pull any “objectionable content,” which would happen willy-nilly if the history of YouTube and Apple are considered. It’s a combination of DRM server scares and not actually being indie which still doesn’t sit well with me.

Perhaps it would work if everyone assembled such a service themselves. Host files on Amazon S3, take PayPal (or some other, more micropayment-focused service), and you’re done. You’re depending on corporations for the infrastructure, but they’re basically dumb pipes. They won’t shut you down if you’re controversial, and if they go bankrupt, switch to someone else.

Alternatively, for the convenience of people without credit cards or living in countries with taxes or tariffs that cause problems, make payment optional. Very few forms of media can be experienced on the Internet without downloading anything, and technologies allowing you to record music or movies from your screen and speakers prove that people want options. Right now, game developers have a free ride; while it’s possible to hear the same song or see the same movie on your iPod as opposed to your computer, Grand Theft Auto IV probably wouldn’t work all that well (it doesn’t work all that well on PCs in the first place, but I digress). This will change. But because of this desire for options, things need to be downloadable in an open format recognized by whatever Personal Media Device or Mobile Entertainment Console or MPπ player happens to exist. Therefore, piracy will occur, so you need to not depend on people paying for easily redistributable stuff. Make them pay for your continued ability to do work. I don’t have an easy, surefire answer about how to do this, other than that you should make donations easy, flexible, and conspicuous. Allow people to pay whatever they want, and some might pay $5000. If not, at least the 100,000 people who downloaded it from Pirate Bay will pay a dollar. With enough experimentation and loud screaming about this business model, the general public will get used to it, and it will be completely normal.

Either way, all that’s left is getting the word out. But with the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter, IMing, and the age-old practice of human beings ejaculating the word-language from their face-mouths, anything with a compelling, free teaser and a low-to-no price of entry to its awesomeness will sell itself. Such a system will work very well for the 10% of people who make stuff that isn’t crap.

The other 90% may be out of luck. I’ve been thinking for about a half hour how to follow up that statement, originally believing that’s not a good thing. After all, lots of great ideas fail miserably the first time they’re attempted. But then I realized that that 99% of crap is mediocre, derivative, and boring, failing to add anything new to the world. A decreased chance for mediocrity to achieve anything for a creator is actually a pretty awesome thing. People who genuinely have passion for what they do will improve themselves and come back strong, while idiots jumping on the bandwagon will move on to find something they’re actually good at. To some degree, the world works that way already.

So the best thing for an indie artist, musician, filmmaker, game developer, or writer to do in this day and age is twofold: Don’t suck at what you do, and make it easy for people to realize that.

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• Quick! Tell Everyone!