Anon said,

I think you got it on the wrong foot, Jay.

He’s pretty frank and sarcastic and his speech is actually a bit entertaining.

There is a major difference to you, though:
He is definitely a capitalist (he is also a shareholder) – while you are hobbyist entrepreneur with a day job (no flame intended!).

You certainly have certain business ethics that he lacks – but he freely admits them: He will rip you off if it makes him money. I think this is pretty honest.

You will sit in your chair (probably paid by your day job) and tear our your hair over new game mechanics.

He will sit in his chair (paid by his dividends) and think about what he will rip off of your game.

You have the freedom to decide what game you are making – and you pretty much exactly make the game you want.

He can only make games that promise him lots of profit. Everything else isn’t interesting and he won’t waste resources on it. The interesting bit: Guys like him examine the market, see where the money & success is – and then try to clone it. This is an easier way to make money than trial & error.
And this is also how a typical Hollywood producer works.

Guess who is the bigger “capitalist pig-dog”?

You may not like him but he certainly is neither a dickweed nor a role model in this video.
He is simply different and mainstream game companies are full of people/producers like him who must be successful or they don’t get another project (then they drop out and become indie again ;-)).

Rampant Coyote said,

I never played FarmTown so I may have missed the genesis, but I did play a little bit of Harvest Moon a long time ago and I never even considered the connection, let alone thinking of Farmville as a “clone of a clone of Harvest Moon.” I dunno.

Yeah, maybe I’m getting the guy wrong, but I’m one of those poor deluded guys who still loves games, game development, and considers it an “art” as much as an industry. If you want to survive in the biz, you can’t just be an “artiste” – you have to create things the customers want. When you are making something for the masses, granted, it’s probably not going to break a bunch of boundaries (though sometimes it does). I’m fine with that. But as I mentioned Tuesday, there’s a spectrum, and when you go clear the way out into the “rip off” side of the spectrum – and / or start treating your customers like wallets with legs – then I get disgusted.

RealityBites said,

He’s in it to make quick, relatively easy money. Like Activision, EA, etc. who “copy” from their own games and “add +1” with annual releases of Madden or Call of Duty. Yeah he’s a douche but that’s capitalism (ho!) for you.

The more mainstream (i.e. grabbing the largest market available), the more you have to water down your artistic vision to please the masses to get their money.

There are those rare few who can balance staying true to their art and yet make decent money but the majority are going to swing on one side or the other.

Aman said,

I really don’t get these non-arguments in defense of useless assholes. What good does a person with the worldview espoused in the video actually serve? What good is Zynga? The fact that most people can actually answer that question with regards to EA and (sometimes) even Activision shows how specious that comparison is. Zynga makes EA seem like a bastion of creativity and patron to the fine arts.

It’s okay to make value judgements, people. I don’t want to live in a society of nothing but plutocrats and a dead-eyed submissive underclass.

Demiath said,

I really liked that little talk; it was refreshing and honest and didn’t shy away from the harsh realities of what being successful in social gaming actually entails. And beneath all those thick layers of hip sarcasm – which from a rhetorical standpoint is precisely what works with them kids these days – the parasitic incrementalism he clearly felt a need to justify has some merit.

RealityBites said,

@Aman

So commenting about it on a relatively obscure indie RPG blog (no offense intended to Rampant Coyote at all) is going to change the world? Why don’t you become a teacher so people will gain a better appreciation of higher art and reject the kind of crap he puts out.

I for one don’t play Facebook games, encourage my friends not to, have not given a single cent to his company or Zynga. And who was the one who invited his company to this event and invited him to speak? The gaming collective should be blacklisting this guy, but they instead give him a microphone and a chance to spew his garbage. Is that what you’re self-righteous indignation is about?

We’re not justifying him or his kind. Yes, it’s disgusting. But people like him are always going to exist no matter what industry and as long as there is money to be made.

Also, quoting Picasso, “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” Minecraft copied Infiniminer. Binding of Isaac is Robotron with Zelda skin coupled with Roguelike aspects. Frayed Knights copied M&M and Wizardry. Braid copied Mario with an added time bending mechanic. Etc. Etc.

Avalon said,

“Also, quoting Picasso, “Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal” Minecraft copied Infiniminer. Binding of Isaac is Robotron with Zelda skin coupled with Roguelike aspects. Frayed Knights copied M&M and Wizardry. Braid copied Mario with an added time bending mechanic. Etc. Etc.”

The problem with your theory is that people like Bailey or Zynga aren’t even artists. Artists are creative. By definition of what they are doing they are quite clearly and rightfully parasites.

Aman said,

@Demiath

“I think this just might be a question of having different views on human nature. As the naive and trusting Swede I am (raised in a comfortable social democratic society in which the worst excesses of rampant capitalism are either banned or at the very least frowned upon)…

This may explain a lot. Mr. Baily is very much someone who has bought into and benefited from said excesses, and who is pretty typical to the U.S. (I know he’s from Canada but close enough). If you look at the “About” page on East Side’s company website, the word “bootstrapped” is used excessively and meaninglessly, for example. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, I envy you. This probably also explains how you managed to find the content of the talk “refreshing” – it’s stale bullshit over here.

“I have a really hard time seeing people’s motivations and behaviors in terms of them being genuine “assholes” or “dickweeds”. In particular, I don’t believe for a second that those who actively try to come off as provocative and mean have as their primary motivation in life to be disliked by others. There’s usually far more to the story than such charged and moralistic language would seem to suggest.”

I make no presumptions regarding his motivation for this talk let alone his life, and you certainly don’t have to intend to be disliked to be an asshole or a dickweed, so I hope I didn’t imply that. Advocating stealing in a smarmy and insulting way, however, makes you an asshole.

“In this case, Jason Bailey repeatedly emphasized that merely ripping off other game developers is never enough; you always have to add something which significantly improves upon the original design idea (at least in the admittedly limited sense that the new product attracts a wider casual audience). And please note that this does not in any way suggest that he himself actually practices what he preaches; i.e. that he is somehow better than the Gamelofts of the world, who do indeed rip off other developer’s ideas unashamedly.”

I think your problem may be a lack of familiarity with Zynga and their business model, so the parts about improving the design sounded plausible to you. But even if you only go by what he said, can you really defend ripping off a game “pixel for pixel” while you leverage your absurdly large resources only to make changes on the margins mostly to optimize for profit (being stingy with in-game currency) and using your gigantic platform to market it in a way that the real designers could never hope to do? What he’s advocating and what Zynga does is to scour for competitors who have a successful design, but who are small enough that they can’t compete when you steal it and rush it to a wider market before they are able to. This is crippling to the design community.

It’s much worse than what Gameloft does which is to leverage the success of already hugely successful properties to sell portable facsimiles on platforms where they’re not available. This is arguably just filling a need in the market and isn’t anywhere near as unethical as what Zynga does. Even if you thought that making a game that resembles another successful game on a different platform was somehow unethical, at least their “victims” (many of whom have actually hired Gameloft to make official portable versions of their properties) are gigantic companies that aren’t in any way vulnerable, not small three-man companies that can’t fight back.

If nothing else, a generous interpretation of Bailey’s talk gives us something interesting to talk about in terms of how good design ideas become memes which spread throughout the developer community. By contrast, if one were to approach this from a more cynical perspective all that really could be said is that Jason Bailey’s got us right where he wants us; as raging “games as art” fanboys pouring expletives over the Internet, confirming all his purported prejudices on the pathetic nature of indie nerds while he himself goes off and makes a lot of money. So, yeah, needless to say I’m going to stick with the more optimistic and constructive interpretation…”

Feel free to start that conversation.

And, for the record, I have no problem talking about games as art or with confirming anybody’s prejudices. Just because someone mocks me doesn’t mean I have to adopt their point of view. I love games, and I’m not ashamed of it.

Ruber Eaglenest said,

Ayn Rand, the founder of objectivism, something that could be seem like “extreme capitalism”, or nowadays neoliberalism, would define this guy as a “parasite”.

Indeed, I am listening a voice in Bioshock telling “The Artist borrows from others and makes her oww, Zynga are parasites”.

So in a way, this guy represent values against some of the ethics of capitalism and the american dream, you know that of, “someone could rise and have success just by the work of his hands”. This guy wants to have success stealing the work from others.