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What Would Happen If (Almost) Nobody Paid for RPGs?
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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 4747412" data-attributes="member: 54877"><p>I've got a different take: The described results are not sustainable, and thus could only be a transitional state, not the end state.</p><p> </p><p>1. If amateurs are putting out mostly crap, then the hobby effectively dies, as a hobby. You'll have it lingering on or living off scraps for some time, but no new blood means death.</p><p> </p><p>2. In contrast, if some amateurs are putting out some good stuff--they or someone else will not stay amateurs. </p><p> </p><p>Because if you create value, you create a demand. If you can satisfy that demand, you have a market. If you have a market, then you can do things to make money. Granted, if everything is on some kind of creative commons license, you can't sell that content as your own. You <em>can</em>, however, sell services--packaging, printing, organizing, yada, yada, yada. </p><p> </p><p>Some people will get really good at making money with the "new rules". These guys will use that money to encourage new content to feed the market. People they pay will sometimes want to give them what they want--to get paid more.</p><p> </p><p>You can dance around this with various suppositions that impede or accelerate the process, but you can't totally escape it. For example, if no one can get paid directly to put out free stuff, then some academics/government people might put out free stuff--because they are interested in it and can arrange for it to fall under the purview of their job, and people that want to do that kind of thing can only make a living by getting that kind of work. I suppose if a computer professer can justify doing open source work with his class, then a clever psychology or ancient history professor can do the same thing with roleplaying. Or even someone in a defense department job, given the right parameters. But note that all we did was change the mechanism of pay to be funneled through the government from taxes, rather than through a corporation via payments. And we are still back to the original point--either what they do is sufficiently valuable to generate an external market, or it isn't.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 4747412, member: 54877"] I've got a different take: The described results are not sustainable, and thus could only be a transitional state, not the end state. 1. If amateurs are putting out mostly crap, then the hobby effectively dies, as a hobby. You'll have it lingering on or living off scraps for some time, but no new blood means death. 2. In contrast, if some amateurs are putting out some good stuff--they or someone else will not stay amateurs. Because if you create value, you create a demand. If you can satisfy that demand, you have a market. If you have a market, then you can do things to make money. Granted, if everything is on some kind of creative commons license, you can't sell that content as your own. You [I]can[/I], however, sell services--packaging, printing, organizing, yada, yada, yada. Some people will get really good at making money with the "new rules". These guys will use that money to encourage new content to feed the market. People they pay will sometimes want to give them what they want--to get paid more. You can dance around this with various suppositions that impede or accelerate the process, but you can't totally escape it. For example, if no one can get paid directly to put out free stuff, then some academics/government people might put out free stuff--because they are interested in it and can arrange for it to fall under the purview of their job, and people that want to do that kind of thing can only make a living by getting that kind of work. I suppose if a computer professer can justify doing open source work with his class, then a clever psychology or ancient history professor can do the same thing with roleplaying. Or even someone in a defense department job, given the right parameters. But note that all we did was change the mechanism of pay to be funneled through the government from taxes, rather than through a corporation via payments. And we are still back to the original point--either what they do is sufficiently valuable to generate an external market, or it isn't. [/QUOTE]
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