I'm searching for people interested in creation of remote, horizontal game dev worker cooperative

Project

Hi!

As I wrote in the title I'm looking for people interested in such an endeavor. I already tried creating such a project but due to internal disagreements it didn't pan out, still I am very interested in trying this out. Game dev is very susceptible to exploitation from capitalists which is very unfortunate given that means of production are essentially socialized already - we have FOSS software like Godot that is enough to create very elaborate projects and we can collaborate remotely so no land is needed either. This makes it I think a very fruitful direction to go, because costs of game dev are not very big and returns can be big if the game is successful.

I know that there is a huge competition in game dev, but given that in worker cooperative nothing is siphoned by capitalists at the top I think it's not impossible to get to the level of subsistence on game dev, while being able to affect the culture and promote cooperativism among the general population and among video game creators.

I don't have a specific game dev experience but I like solving complex problems and I am interested in doing a worker cooperative, I already did quite a bit of research during my previous attempt at this type of worker cooperative and I would for this coop to get inspiration from Igalia, Motion Twin and Sociocracy.

At my last project people had issues that I am fine with anti-foundationalist philosophies so please consider that I like those and I like to discuss from those lenses. I am very good at self-directed learning and I could especially do stuff like coding, design, writing plot and characters, I could research some more legalistic side of cooperative but it would be nice certainly to have someone who has some expertise here. That still leave places for people interested in audio and graphics and I am very fine with redundancy in some aspects of the required "expertise", still I am a big believer in learning by doing and getting feedback and improving based on this feedback so I am mostly looking for people willing to learn, explore and collaborate to hopefully create something cool.

I would like to create games such as Planescape Torment, Disco Elysium, Hotline Miami, FTL: Faster Than Light, Spec Ops: The Line, Portal 2, Undertale, Getting Over It, The Talos Principle, Vampire the Masqurade: Bloodlines, KOTOR 2. If you are interested in this project please get in touch, we may correspond a bit and see if we would like to collaborate!

I somewhat wonder about trying to release those games on FOSS licenses (still with asking for “paying” for them to support the creators), that would be “purer” from anarchist perspective than using proprietary license but this is not something I have thought about that much. The pro would be it being impossible to get the license stolen how almost happened to Disco Elysium creators.

Anarchy4Everyone

10d

in solarpunkby InternalEarly5885

95%

10d

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EricHunting

10d

It would be interesting to see is the Open Value Network model of Sensorica could apply to game development.

MarsupialMole

10d

FOSS licences are a hack to subvert the biases of copyright. There's nothing pure about them. It would be just a bit of an extra overhead but there's nothing to stop you distributing the game under a proprietary licence that contains code you distribute separately under a FOSS licence and has assets derived from source art you also distribute separately under a CC licence. If you own the copyright you can do whatever you want at the point of distribution, including delaying the free distribution or putting it behind clear crowdfunding goals that offer a well defined "exit to community" for a property you don't necessarily want to keep working on forever.

Are you interested in a union coop? It might be fruitful to get in touch with a union appropriate for your personal circumstances to at least expand your network.

InternalEarly5885

Could you elaborate on what is a union coop or give some sources for that?

MarsupialMole

I think exactly what is legal is dependent on jurisdiction but and example would be a worker cooperative where all owners are union members or just where the unions role to represent a group of workers is enshrined in the cooperative model.

Basically I'm just suggesting to contact the union to work with them to set things up. It might or might not be a good fit.

https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Union_Cooperatives

I just got that from a Google search. I don't know if it's a good resource and I'm not even sure what it describes covers the breadth of what is referred to as a union coop.