Jan
15th
2018
Signal boost: The Indie Hypocrisy · 5:48am Jan 15th, 2018
Viking ZX posted a short op-ed relevant to fanfic:
The Indie Hypocrisy. That's a link to his fimfiction blog, where he just posts a teaser; the full post is here, on a wordpress blog he uses for his non-pony audience.
It's about why indie music, indie computer games, and indie movies are all considered better than the mainstream, while indie books are considered much worse than the mainstream.
Have thoughts on that? Post 'em on one of his blogs. Or just bask in the warm glow of a shared umbrage.
Already saw it, agreed with his views completely. But then again, I read way too much hoers wardz to be able to say anything about indie books.
This is the word count of the bookshelf where I store all the fanfics I give a 'like' to:
image.prntscr.com/image/dEZJDfqfRV2Aqudi-fGsgg.png
~Crystalline Electrostatic~
I left a much longer post on the blog, but mostly it's the time and expense involved. It's easier and cheaper to play and record music, and develop games, than it is to write and publish books. And there is a much bigger audience for music and games than there is for books. Plus, checking out a new band or artist takes a few minutes, a new game an hour or two, a new books can take days or weeks, so readers are more conservative in what they'll pick up without prior recommendation or some sense of quality control.
And up until very recently, the indie publishing scene was dominated by vanity presses, which charges authors fees for the privilege of publishing rather than paying advances and royalties, so they tend to be inundated with authors whose egos are far out of scale relative to their talent and skill. So indie publishing has gotten a well-earned reputation for being the realm of utter crap.
The real irony is that indie stuff is mostly pretty bad across all industries. The big commercial stuff does tend to be better on average, because absolute drek isn't profitable to produce (well, on average - some will still be profitable).
Like, in indie games, people talk about how "original" and "innovative" indie games are, but by and large, they're actually mostly extremely derivative and generally lower-budget and lower-quality. Very few of them are very original and few of them have interesting or novel mechanics - in fact, a much smaller percentage of them are creative than is the case with the AAA industry.
The aversion towards indie stuff in books in particular is quite bizarre, though, as it is the realm perhaps most open to such things thanks to the Internet.
4774276
Music? Yes.
Games are the most work-intensive thing we do for entertainment. Way above books, and even above movies, judging by the time and budgets sunk into video games.
4851984
That's only true if you look only at mainstream AAA or large indie studio titles. Look at the sheer volume of "garage" games made with tools like RPGMaker. Stencyl, or GameMaker, some of which are drag-and-drop and require no coding skills, and some of which require only basic scripting skills, and can be put together in a few days or a few weeks. Games made like this have become quite popular, for example The Binding of Isaac or Middens. There are literally thousands of such games out there. Few of them are particularly good, but they exist in very large numbers, and some are quite original.
As for budgets, most of the big costs of AAA games and big indie games (after you've discounted staff salaries) are promotion costs, and licensing the tools needed to create them (small indie games using free and low-cost tools don't have the latter cost). Once those are paid for, the costs of actually distributing games is minimal. Games and music don't have the same materials cost that printing books does.
4852108
Even something as simple as Pitfall took about a thousand hours to complete. Today you can build something that simple much faster due to better tools, but games are also much more sophisticated. Most games take tens if not hundreds of thousands of man-hours to complete, and the biggest ones have taken millions.
Actual game development costs tens of millions of dollars unto itself for AAA games, plus marketing costs on top of that.
JK Rowling's books didn't take a huge amount of extra work to make over any other book of similar length.
Games are incredibly time intensive relative to writing.
4852503
Again, these are all big commercial titles produced by large corporations, they're not even remotely relevant to what was being discussed. It's perfectly possible to turn out a playable, entertaining game on one's own with nowhere near the amount of time and resources you describe, I can link you to websites featuring hundreds of them. There are quite a number up on Steam. Hell, one of my wife's sons created several of his own, on his own personal computer over the course of a few months, using free tools, with free distribution.
And as you've patently ignored, time is not the issue. Material cost is the issue. There are numerous free tools for creating and recording music. There are numerous free tools for creating video games, including entire engines. And distribution for both is a matter of a few cents for a blank CD or DVD. There are no free printing services for books.
4852530
The "AAA books" would be things like JK Rowling.
How many man hours did the Harry Potter books take to make compared to an AAA game?
Not much.
Even a game made by a team like Supergiant still probably takes 10k+ man-hours to produce.
The reality is that most single-person projects in games are absolute trash, while a single person can still produce a reasonable story. Very, very rarely do single-person projects in games pan out, and they often take half a decade or more to produce - things like Cave Story, Undertale, and Fez are very rare, and also take enormous amounts of time (many years of continuous labor) to create.
The game industry is centered around teams of people because of the amount of effort and variety of skills it takes to produce a game.
The analogy would be a free word processor, of which there are large numbers. And eBooks are equivalent to digital distribution of video games and movies. Or heck, FIMFiction to YouTube.