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I’d tip the developers, but not the shareholders or execs who treat the developers like slaves…
If there’s a need for tips, your business model sucks and you should be ashamed of yourself.
If there’s no need for tips, you could just take some of your perverted bonuses or some of that ridiculous amount of money you take out of children’s pockets with micro transactions and show those people some love who did the actual work, you prick. They make millions and millions for you.
What a world we live in where asshats like that step forward and ejaculate their greed into the world and expect applause!
Disgusting.
I think the concept of “Pay what you want.” is a very friendly approach to this. It already exists on platforms like itch.io and some free to play games financed through donations, like Dwarf Fortress, also became extremely popular. Humble Bundles are also pretty famous for this. And of course kickstarters do something a bit similar to this.
Personally I’d love to see donation buttons/infos especially for all the free music and games that exist out there. But I want to make sure my donations reach the people who actually worked on it, so I dislike products like paypal or patreon where a portion of the money goes to men in the middle and their managers/owners, etc. A bank account number or something along those lines where I can transfer money a bit more directly would be nice, but some creators only provide paypal buttons, so I won’t donate.
He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping. It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.
Worse, since if you tip through the game you’re almost certainly just giving that money to the execs
Like they said, exactly like tipping at a restaurant.
That’s where work contracts can help. Any form of tipping and how it is split would have to be handled by a contract anyway.
He’s not talking about donations though, he’s talking about paying full price THEN tipping.
I’m aware of that. The “Pay what you want.” concept mentioned in my first paragraph was its own idea/suggestion/thought, since it kinda fits the topic. It’s a different thing.
It’s a blatant excuse to pay developers less while placing financial guilt on the people paying for the product. It’s the same way tipping at a restaurant works.
Not really, really good video games take months or even years to complete, so your developers will want to be paid for that time before they become profitable. At restaurants the initial investment isn’t quite as high, as far as wages are concerned. I’d argue that you get tipped before even getting your first monthly paycheck. That can not be the case for video game tips.
I assume software developers and other people in the IT sector are also in higher demand than waiters, so they don’t have it quite as bad as waiters. That’s why I think they’re not comparable.
That said, I do believe that a company that is open about the tips it receives could be interesting for developers. If I saw that tips were actually split evenly among all the employees and their work hours then I think it’d be worth considering applying there. Though I guess for fairness those tips should even be paid out if employees quit or get kicked out so you’d have to track how much each person contributed to each product and that could be a bit of a bureaucratic hassle.
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I’m aware of that and also see the problem, but argue that that’s partially because most people just aren’t used to this. People’s actions depend a lot on what they consider the norm. Take waiters or other service people as an example - in some cultures it’s usual to tip them, in others it’s unusual or even frowned upon.
You would have to at least have a base minimum purchase price and then accept tips on top.
That’s also fine. If the initial price were lower than other comparable games then I assume that more people could be convinced to tip. Or even just if a company is very open about their work / income and dedicated to communicating to their players. I think there’s already some companies like that, though perhaps not necessarily the big ones.
The dorf fort devs made like $3k-6k per month throughout the 2010s. They did end up going commercial to get more. But it was hardly “not even a little profitable.” I mean, I’d take that deal to do what I love too.
How about shareholders tip me instead?
To all of you who still tip in this day and age: will this convince you that tipping culture only exists to underpay (usually black) workers?
As a white middle-aged guy who spent most of my youth waiting tables for a job…No.
You think we like it!? Stiffing the human who relies on those tips to survive will not change tipping culture.
Sure then, tip your landlord for all I care.
Lol, nice strawman.
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I would be totally ok with even the bigger developers just having tip jars on their websites. It took me so long to get money to the relevant peoples after a few years as a teen of pirating stuff and then eventually reforming and feeling bad after. But I also wouldn’t mind if games were cheaper as a whole, but you could tip the ones you enjoyed. Gives incentive for games to be worth it when you have finished them, rather than before you start them.
