I am not suggesting that you don't seek employment in a field you enjoy because you'd be happy doing it free; I'm suggesting that employment in the field you like may not be available because other people will happily do it for free.
They would do it the more happily if they can obtain payment for it, and they can do that without much more effort.
The sooner you accept this the more time you have to be happy with the rest of your life.
I recently started my own business, I’m in good health, and I’m surrounded by loving family, but, no, my happiness hinges upon the availability of employment in the video-game industry. I am also spending much time worrying about it. Your assumption is almost amusing.
You know why being a singer generally doesn't pay? It's because there are a million singers who are actually good -- the business isn't driven by singing talent, it's driven by marketing. For every top-selling artist out there, there's a team of marketers, promoters, agents, producers, etc, who cut deals to get airtime and buy advertising slots, etc. That team could have made the same sales numbers and profits with any of a thousand different equally available artists. The "talent" is completely interchangeable.
Obviously, singing is not as valuable as marketing. Singers are everywhere, and marketing is expensive.
And we're starting to see a similar thing in the games industry. People go to work for a big-name game studio and they get an hourly wage, with overtime, which is the tiniest slice of huge marketing-driven sales of a huge team-created product. Other people produce something small without getting paid, and then get donations and tips from people who like it, and increasingly the money's the same per hour worked, either way. The studio job will make you work sixty hours a week, and pay you for it, and the "indies" usually don't spend more than fifteen hours a week on their projects, so the money's different. But the hourly money? Nearly the same, and declining.
Note the words “big” and “small” here. A team of people that are working full-time can create a far superior product more quickly than a single man, so the lone wolf will not be able to somehow make the company obsolete, as his game is far inferior. Wages rise as employees become more scarce, so, if they really are “nearly the same, and declining,” for which I have naught but your word, it is unlikely the wages will descend below the lone wolf’s profits.
The Internet means you no longer need all the intermediaries to reach your market. The marketers, promoters, and so on, are no longer making contributions that make things more available to the consumer, and their value is accordingly reduced.
This is incorrect and naive. The Internet does not guarantee visiblity to the target market
at all. People usually find things out in the wilds of the Internet with a search engine. You need to discover which keywords they will be using. Better use of the right keywords will get you better rankings of course, but there are thousands of other websites out there with the same idea. It’s not just as simple as using the right keywords either. Search engines have different ways of prioritizing the soup of
billions of pages that they get. Even if you devote your time to studying search-engine-optimization techniques, it is difficult.
The Internet does not equal visibility, and it is ironic that the popularity of the Internet is precisely what has done that.
Expensive products are undesirable in the presence of cheaper (or free) products that are equally good or better. “Piracy” is just the marketing people complaining about consumers recognizing how worthless the marketing people have become and refusing to provide the revenue that their former status deserved.
It is not just about marketing. As I have previously mentioned, a team of people working full-time on game project can do far more than any single man working alone on both his project and a full-time job.
I have already explained in this thread why piracy is immoral; it is not just someone “complaining”.
You have also suggested that piracy is directly linked to the uselessness of marketers, but there is no perceptible correlation, especially since marketing is not useless. If it is, we should go call all of the businesses that use it, as I am sure that they would like to save the millions of dollars that they spend upon this useless practice.
People can not use products that they do not know exist. Businesses must reach consumers. Marketing serves that end.
Piracy becomes a nonissue when the race to the bottom is finished. And it will be finished.
What you have written here is based upon incorrect assumptions, so I see little reason to believe you.
