Re:The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
by brownbat on Thursday January 15, 2015 @06:35PM
(#8896191)
That's a valuable refinement, thanks.
So when someone claims "These people should get paid more because they worked hard," they're making claims that not even Marx would endorse.
Re:The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
by tragic on Friday January 16, 2015 @04:06AM
(#8897842)
Depends on the meaning of "should" there - if you mean according to the laws of capitalist society, then no, they shouldn't: they should be paid what it costs to feed and clothe them in all cases, and the rest (surplus value) should be used to expand production through capital investment (including productivity-enhancing machinery etc) or hiring on more people. (Skills and so on complicate the picture.)
If "should" means "in an ideal world", however, Marx and his followers would argue that the whole point is to enable people not to work so bloody hard anyway, so the question does not arise.
Price, of course, is a different thing from value, but that's another matter entirely with a vast literature, pro- and anti-LTV.
The LTV is a reasonably good predictor of the behaviour of markets in commodity goods, with some exceptions (the rent-economy around oil is a good example). My feeling is that with indie games, niche music and so on, there's a problem in that some people will make them for the sheer joy of it, which means wider movement in these small sub-economies do not track things so closely.
[0] Using Marx's version here, not so well read on Smith, Ricardo and so forth.