Doesn't matter if you are a freelancer or a corporation. The same idea applies regardless.
Sorry, but it does matter. I don't sell my work to the public. I sell it to a company. It's a much different dynamic.
Also there was no insult, just an observation that your point of view seems to lack logic and seems to come from a fear of competion. ]An insult would be to call you a blankty, blank, blank, etc. I don't see the need to do that.
One key difference between an insult and a statement is that you back up your statements -- so do so, please. Am I using a strawman? Am I employing a reductio ad absurdum argument? I would appreciate a clear outline on what flaws you find in the logic of my argument.
I will continue to say that your posts in this thread don't make sense to me. I will also point out that almost all the other posters on this subject have disagreed with you. If your point of view was logical you would have some more support.
You appear to be the false impression that business decisions and their worth ought to be democratically determined.
You have an amazing way of showing that. A desire to artificially segment products in a way that would prevent people from purchasing most of the products
Please point out where I am advocating that people be prevented from buying something.
is a way to keep others from succeeding.
Actually, what I would like is for failures to shuffle off. Understand this: I believe that much of the problem consists of failures that people will not admit are failures. I want a thriving market where the consumer can more easily make a choice between reliable quality and experimental vision. These tiers have worked with every other form of media -- *every* one, as far as I can reasonably determine.
If you really want everyone to succeed, you want to lower the obstacles to success.
That's exactly what I want.
Who are you to say what is success? Everyone has different ideas of what success is. What you consider success, others may not.
Yes, and not all of these ideas are equally valid. If you are pulling less than minimum wage pumping this stuff out, you can call it success all you like -- but it isn't a definition of success that anybody ought to pay attention to.
Also the idea that you have to make a certain amount of money is just plain insulting to many entrepenours. There are thousands of companies that worked for a few years at a loss before they ever made a profit.
And there are thousands of companies that worked for years at a loss -- and made a loss. These are failed businesses.
Again why should they have to leave the commercial world just because you want them to?
If this was determined by my personal feelings, then I would point to some *successful* companies that I think ought to pack it in. I'm not. I'm talking about companies that aren't meeting reasonable standards.
Again if you really feel this way you should stop trying to sell any of your work. There are others that are out there that have been doing things close enough to yours before you.
To a degree, standards are subjective. I worked to ensure that there were few enough redundant elements in Posthuman to make it worth people's money. By contrast, though, there *is* work of mine that I don't think you should buy. Cyber Style: Net of Dreams is substandard work. The first draft was released without my knowledge before it was properly developed. You can look forward to superior work about the same subject later on in the Terminal Identity line. I would prefer that it was pulled, but I have no power over the decisions of the publisher since they eventually did render payment. So I am willing to say that something of mine shouldn't be out there.
(And to insert a plug, the hacking and virtual space stuff I have *now* is far superior, and I can't wait to share it!)
Why don't you start filling those hobby pages? If you see the need for them and want to limit the field of the commercial entries, then you should start doing the hobby stuff.
Your attempts to paint me as a hypocrite are growing increasingly tiresome. In fact, I do contribute commercially nonviable work to hobby pages regularly, under the auspices of my own blog and by submitting to sites like Wolf-Spoor.org. It may disappoint, but I *do*, in fact, walk my talk as much as I am able.
I don't really expect you to stop freelancing, but why do you think that you should expect everyone else to limit their opportunities for your sake?
Where are opportunities being "limited." The folks who are operating at a loss are not seizing an opportunity. They are failing and diluting the identity of successful companies.
Competion exists whether you call yourself a company or a freelancer.
It's a completely different kind of competition.
When I freelanced computer articles, I had a one person company just to make it easier for me financially.
This is not the same as releasing games. It really isn't.
If magazine freelance markets were like RPGNow, a magazine would be the size of a phone book. It would include every single submission by anybody who could spell and would be laid out by the authors. You would rely on an index that would give you a rough idea what it was about. If you waited a week, your copy would have annotations from random readers as to whether they liked an article or not. Half of the articles would describe plugins of out of date or obsolete software.
But I guess that would be OK, as long as the authors all felt good about themselves, eh?
The best way for the industry and the hobby to be healthy is to have the competition that you desire to avoid.
Conversely, I think that you are promoting a point of view where we pretend that nobody is *really* unsuccessful, because they've found self-fulfillment or somesuch. On a personal level, I applaud people doing these things. But I'm interested in promoting sustainable financial success, not therapy.
Marketing has two major points: awareness and perceived value. Those funny, sexy, flashy, etc. commercials are designed to make you aware of the product and to remember it. The other part of marketing is to make you want to buy the product. The way they do that is perceived value. Some products they tell you how good the product is and/or how much you
will save. Other times the perceived value is just the sense that a product is something that everyone else has or doesn't have. For instance Tommy Hilfager, you want it because you think everyone else has it.
Neither of these has anything to do with the actual quality of the product. You have agreed with me here, and disagreed with yourself, because you have shot down your own argument that the consumer is an actor who will automatically choose a quality product.
