TL;DR: Critically-acclaimed and fan-beloved roguesoulsvanialike Dead Cells is made by a company called Motion Twin, which functions as a co-op: all the employees are paid the same, decisions are debated and made collectively, etc. Motion Twin does not want to work on Dead Cells forever (indeed, didn't even plan to work on it for this long), but some of the devs do, and fans want that as well. So, a new company, Evil Empire, has been made by a couple of folks who split off from Motion Twin; this company will inherit Dead Cells, and will operate according to standard capitalist practices.
This is interesting to me because Motion Twin was kind of notable in the games industry for operating as a co-op; it's interesting to now see them basically say "maintaining and adding continued content to a game is not compatible with a co-op structure". Apparently Motion Twin has hovered around the size of 8-10 employees, because their process couldn't accommodate more; Evil Empire wants to grow to a larger size and take on larger amounts of work, and also wants to build up some reserve funds to emergencies/dry spells (at Motion Twin, 95% of the profits go directly to the employees).
I can't say I'm an ardent capitalism fanboy - it's hard to look at the state of the world (by which I mean the people living on this planet) and the state of the world (by which I mean this planet) and not think "well... maybe we should take a second look at this capitalism thing" - but at the same time the environment at Motion Twin sounds insanely stressful to me. Having to defend your intents and actions to 9 other people on a regular basis, even if those people are your pals, sounds like way more emotional work than I can handle. Granted, I don't know if that's worse than my current 9-to-6-soul-crushing-grind that's destroying my enthusiasm for my field and I think my health. I'm glad that someone's out there trying these alternate systems, though; I wish more companies were willing to explore more. Maybe then someone would be able to find some alternative that would work for me.
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
+16
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
More equitable revenue sharing within organizations, a flatter pay hierarchy, is basically an untrammeled good and it kind of sucks that people keep wanting to shackle it to a bunch of other experiments that are less obviously good (or at least less obviously good fits for the kind of thing the organization is doing). I feel like you ought to be able to have a business where the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers is much smaller without turning it into "show of hands, are we okay with letting Dave take a pee break."
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
Yeah. A team of 10 people needs someone in a leadership position. If only to break ties or just decide what stuff comes up for group discussion/vote. Having to get everyone's buy-in on everything would be tiring.
To be fair, I'm sure the article is summarizing and skipping over the fine details of Motion Twin's deal, and I am further summarizing and skipping over the fine details of the article. I don't want to give the wrong impression of how Motion Twin's thing fully works, because really I don't know.
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
In this scenario, it sounds like the producer would have more responsibility - and potentially more work - than everyone else, while not being paid for that extra burden (assuming equal pay for everyone). Is that just how that goes, and the person taking the role needs to know what they're getting into?
+1
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
I actually wonder if 2021 will be canceled too? Like ps5/scorpio aren't going to have decent install bases in time for the usual october/november launch dates
man I want a decent basketball game that isn't riddled with gambling microtransactions or just... non-existent
more equitable pay structures is the way to go and removing share holders and owners whose only stake is profits is a good thing
co-ops need to be employee/member owned
they need bylaws which indicate what decisions are democratic and everything else is decided by operational need
since operation is the concern not profits, this means you have more revenue to spend on things like benefits and improving your employee's quality of life outside of pay
you definitely need an organizational structure and pay structure to be competitive and scalable
as someone who works for a co-op, we pay typically higher than local market rates, and we focus on delivering services to the community
and main issues are where capitalism culture interferes with the principles of serving our community/employees.
saying everyone gets paid equally and every thing has to be voted on sounds more like a weird cult
To be fair, I'm sure the article is summarizing and skipping over the fine details of Motion Twin's deal, and I am further summarizing and skipping over the fine details of the article. I don't want to give the wrong impression of how Motion Twin's thing fully works, because really I don't know.
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
In this scenario, it sounds like the producer would have more responsibility - and potentially more work - than everyone else, while not being paid for that extra burden (assuming equal pay for everyone). Is that just how that goes, and the person taking the role needs to know what they're getting into?
Well, I guess that depends on whether or not you think management is more burdensome than a non-management position.
But more to the point, it's... dubious to me that there can ever truly be a way of measuring, say, a programmers workload vs an artists workload vs a music/sound engineers workload vs a producers workload to safely assume that "Everyone is doing an exactly equal amount of work and that justifies everyone getting paid exactly equally." At some point if you want a truly flat payment structure, you have to break away from the idea of quantifying the workload in terms of "how much" the individual is doing, and instead look at the greater whole and just make sure everyone is aware of what is expected of them and does it, even if that means more work for some than others.
To be fair, I'm sure the article is summarizing and skipping over the fine details of Motion Twin's deal, and I am further summarizing and skipping over the fine details of the article. I don't want to give the wrong impression of how Motion Twin's thing fully works, because really I don't know.
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
In this scenario, it sounds like the producer would have more responsibility - and potentially more work - than everyone else, while not being paid for that extra burden (assuming equal pay for everyone). Is that just how that goes, and the person taking the role needs to know what they're getting into?
Even if a producer had more responsibility/workload (an assumption I'm not totally sure I'm on board with, but I can roll with it in this hypothetical), they also have more control over the project. "Financial" is not the only form of compensation that has value; "greater ability to affect change" has value.
The idea that the ONLY reward work can have is capital is, well, capitalist. It tends to flatten out and marginalize non-material benefits.
But more to the point, it's... dubious to me that there can ever truly be a way of measuring, say, a programmers workload vs an artists workload vs a music/sound engineers workload vs a producers workload to safely assume that "Everyone is doing an exactly equal amount of work and that justifies everyone getting paid exactly equally." At some point if you want a truly flat payment structure, you have to break away from the idea of quantifying the workload in terms of "how much" the individual is doing, and instead look at the greater whole and just make sure everyone is aware of what is expected of them and does it, even if that means more work for some than others.
Well, that is for 100% sure. Even among programmers: a lot of my teammates just type in commit messages like "Fixed email problem", and write pull request summaries that are just about as descriptive. I write commit messages that actually contain details, and pull request summaries that explain what problem is being solved by the PR and how. I'm sure my code output is lower, because time spent writing English is time not spent writing code. On the other hand, other devs don't need to spend time inducting themselves into the mysteries of all the code that surrounds the code I'm updating, and - in the future - can gain some insight into why a change was made thanks to my commit messages. How do you evaluate these two things against each other?
I also pay attention to the way my co-workers discuss work issues, and ride in to defuse dumb and unnecessary tension (because apparently very intelligent people are incapable of noticing that they are vocalizing only maybe 40% of what is in their heads, and assume that everything else is obvious and implied and that everyone is working from the same base principles, which is absolutely never ever the case); how does that factor into my job description, and how do we weight that against the guy who knocked out three feature requests in the time it took me to get two people to understand each other?
Basically post-scarcity fully-automated utopia can't come soon enough.
To be fair, I'm sure the article is summarizing and skipping over the fine details of Motion Twin's deal, and I am further summarizing and skipping over the fine details of the article. I don't want to give the wrong impression of how Motion Twin's thing fully works, because really I don't know.
That's conflating a flat payment structure with a flat management structure, when they're two different things.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
In this scenario, it sounds like the producer would have more responsibility - and potentially more work - than everyone else, while not being paid for that extra burden (assuming equal pay for everyone). Is that just how that goes, and the person taking the role needs to know what they're getting into?
Even if a producer had more responsibility/workload (an assumption I'm not totally sure I'm on board with, but I can roll with it in this hypothetical), they also have more control over the project. "Financial" is not the only form of compensation that has value; "greater ability to affect change" has value.
The idea that the ONLY reward work can have is capital is, well, capitalist. It tends to flatten out and marginalize non-material benefits.
Hey, good points! I think it's obvious that tediously-capitalist work structures are all I've ever worked in, and lived in, and I haven't read enough about alternatives.
As for responsibility, well. I guess my personality is revealed by the fact that I consider responsibility to be tremendously stressful; I suppose you're right that other folks might have a different outlook.
Isn't the graveyard game very grindy? And the dev feels like grinding builds character or something.
It didn't feel grindy to me, just that there's tons of stuff to do and you really have to figure out what's necessary and what's not. You can also make zombies to handle stuff you feel you'll always need, like crops or wood or what not.
Absolutely my game of the decade tho.
Did they ever open up the town? Or is that area still a "joke"? That was some real fucking bullshit at launch.
No. I have no idea why people expected it to be available. There's plenty to do in the game as is.
Because there's a questline that can take dozens of hours to grind through, that tells you outright, "Do this to get into town"
I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but there was definitely some "Point and laugh at the audience for believing we'd give them what we said we'd give them" that left a bad taste in my mouth
I never saw any of that myself. I know a lot of the quests reference the Ship of the Dead that was stuck in the town harbour but I never expected or wanted to get there.
Isn't the graveyard game very grindy? And the dev feels like grinding builds character or something.
It didn't feel grindy to me, just that there's tons of stuff to do and you really have to figure out what's necessary and what's not. You can also make zombies to handle stuff you feel you'll always need, like crops or wood or what not.
Absolutely my game of the decade tho.
Did they ever open up the town? Or is that area still a "joke"? That was some real fucking bullshit at launch.
No. I have no idea why people expected it to be available. There's plenty to do in the game as is.
Because there's a questline that can take dozens of hours to grind through, that tells you outright, "Do this to get into town"
I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but there was definitely some "Point and laugh at the audience for believing we'd give them what we said we'd give them" that left a bad taste in my mouth
I never saw any of that myself. I know a lot of the quests reference the Ship of the Dead that was stuck in the town harbour but I never expected or wanted to get there.
I just realized that we may have, functionally, played different games
I played close to launch, and there weren't zombies or really anything to automate. The whole thing was rather punishing. A lot of stuff might've changed in between when I played and when you did.
Isn't the graveyard game very grindy? And the dev feels like grinding builds character or something.
It didn't feel grindy to me, just that there's tons of stuff to do and you really have to figure out what's necessary and what's not. You can also make zombies to handle stuff you feel you'll always need, like crops or wood or what not.
Absolutely my game of the decade tho.
Did they ever open up the town? Or is that area still a "joke"? That was some real fucking bullshit at launch.
No. I have no idea why people expected it to be available. There's plenty to do in the game as is.
Because there's a questline that can take dozens of hours to grind through, that tells you outright, "Do this to get into town"
I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but there was definitely some "Point and laugh at the audience for believing we'd give them what we said we'd give them" that left a bad taste in my mouth
I never saw any of that myself. I know a lot of the quests reference the Ship of the Dead that was stuck in the town harbour but I never expected or wanted to get there.
I just realized that we may have, functionally, played different games
I played close to launch, and there weren't zombies or really anything to automate. The whole thing was rather punishing. A lot of stuff might've changed in between when I played and when you did.
Oh I played at launch too. I just really liked the game. I love quests that take a long time to get done tho. I was done before the zombies were added so I'm not sure how much they even automate. But I believe you can build them and replace their organs so they get better and better.
Isn't the graveyard game very grindy? And the dev feels like grinding builds character or something.
It didn't feel grindy to me, just that there's tons of stuff to do and you really have to figure out what's necessary and what's not. You can also make zombies to handle stuff you feel you'll always need, like crops or wood or what not.
Absolutely my game of the decade tho.
Did they ever open up the town? Or is that area still a "joke"? That was some real fucking bullshit at launch.
No. I have no idea why people expected it to be available. There's plenty to do in the game as is.
Because there's a questline that can take dozens of hours to grind through, that tells you outright, "Do this to get into town"
I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but there was definitely some "Point and laugh at the audience for believing we'd give them what we said we'd give them" that left a bad taste in my mouth
I never saw any of that myself. I know a lot of the quests reference the Ship of the Dead that was stuck in the town harbour but I never expected or wanted to get there.
I just realized that we may have, functionally, played different games
I played close to launch, and there weren't zombies or really anything to automate. The whole thing was rather punishing. A lot of stuff might've changed in between when I played and when you did.
Oh I played at launch too. I just really liked the game. I love quests that take a long time to get done tho.
I think I stopped near the end where you need an absurd amount of gold for a quest
I do agree money was crazy hard to get. It was the one thing I had to force myself to keep going after. I thought alchemy was needlessly complex as well but I hear they re-balanced that.
Hey, this is technically a PC game now so I can post it.
Death Stranding's 7-and-a-half-minute launch trailer: (There's probably a bunch of spoilers in here, but it's a Kojima trailer, so it will either be the entire story OR be a complete fakeout and none of this is important)
What if we have full automation and scarcity best of both worlds kind of thing
Full automation - but no resources to implement it so it actually has no impact.
0
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
It's unfortunate that they don't allow users to drag around the boxes of the new layout - I don't like the "social" aspect, the activity feed, being front and center, and DLC, achievements etc moved to the side. The mobile-style tile view I don't care for, either, but it doesn't really impact usability, so whatever.
And I'd like to get back the option to disable the mini icons next to games entries in the list, because scrolling down is chugging really hard - it's why I had them turned off in the old version.
It's unfortunate that they don't allow users to drag around the boxes of the new layout - I don't like the "social" aspect, the activity feed, being front and center, and DLC, achievements etc moved to the side. The mobile-style tile view I don't care for, either, but it doesn't really impact usability, so whatever.
And I'd like to get back the option to disable the mini icons next to games entries in the list, because scrolling down is chugging really hard - it's why I had them turned off in the old version.
I havent even seen new steam and dreading the icons already because my library was already huge and has to scroll forever.
KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
edited October 2019
I think I'm gonna get satisfactory
I think what my life needs right now is building and organizing machines and conveyor belts
Can you reposition the main starting base though? I want to be able to eventually put it on a perfectly level platform and not gross uneven ground
Kwoaru on
+2
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
You can break it down, just make sure you empty out the built in storage box beforehand because it'll try dumping all that stuff into your inventory when you do
It's unfortunate that they don't allow users to drag around the boxes of the new layout - I don't like the "social" aspect, the activity feed, being front and center, and DLC, achievements etc moved to the side. The mobile-style tile view I don't care for, either, but it doesn't really impact usability, so whatever.
And I'd like to get back the option to disable the mini icons next to games entries in the list, because scrolling down is chugging really hard - it's why I had them turned off in the old version.
I havent even seen new steam and dreading the icons already because my library was already huge and has to scroll forever.
I have a 700+ library and the only things I'm seeing is that I can see the icons load in if I scroll really fast and that it's a little bit choppy if I drag the scroll bar to the other end.
Posts
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kxed3/the-ambitious-future-of-dead-cells-is-ditching-co-ops-for-capitalism
TL;DR: Critically-acclaimed and fan-beloved roguesoulsvanialike Dead Cells is made by a company called Motion Twin, which functions as a co-op: all the employees are paid the same, decisions are debated and made collectively, etc. Motion Twin does not want to work on Dead Cells forever (indeed, didn't even plan to work on it for this long), but some of the devs do, and fans want that as well. So, a new company, Evil Empire, has been made by a couple of folks who split off from Motion Twin; this company will inherit Dead Cells, and will operate according to standard capitalist practices.
This is interesting to me because Motion Twin was kind of notable in the games industry for operating as a co-op; it's interesting to now see them basically say "maintaining and adding continued content to a game is not compatible with a co-op structure". Apparently Motion Twin has hovered around the size of 8-10 employees, because their process couldn't accommodate more; Evil Empire wants to grow to a larger size and take on larger amounts of work, and also wants to build up some reserve funds to emergencies/dry spells (at Motion Twin, 95% of the profits go directly to the employees).
I can't say I'm an ardent capitalism fanboy - it's hard to look at the state of the world (by which I mean the people living on this planet) and the state of the world (by which I mean this planet) and not think "well... maybe we should take a second look at this capitalism thing" - but at the same time the environment at Motion Twin sounds insanely stressful to me. Having to defend your intents and actions to 9 other people on a regular basis, even if those people are your pals, sounds like way more emotional work than I can handle. Granted, I don't know if that's worse than my current 9-to-6-soul-crushing-grind that's destroying my enthusiasm for my field and I think my health. I'm glad that someone's out there trying these alternate systems, though; I wish more companies were willing to explore more. Maybe then someone would be able to find some alternative that would work for me.
Even while paying everyone equally, they could have still picked a producer to guide the vision and have final say on things.
Yeah. A team of 10 people needs someone in a leadership position. If only to break ties or just decide what stuff comes up for group discussion/vote. Having to get everyone's buy-in on everything would be tiring.
In this scenario, it sounds like the producer would have more responsibility - and potentially more work - than everyone else, while not being paid for that extra burden (assuming equal pay for everyone). Is that just how that goes, and the person taking the role needs to know what they're getting into?
...aaaaaaaand it's gone again
I actually wonder if 2021 will be canceled too? Like ps5/scorpio aren't going to have decent install bases in time for the usual october/november launch dates
man I want a decent basketball game that isn't riddled with gambling microtransactions or just... non-existent
back to regular human basketball for me
co-ops need to be employee/member owned
they need bylaws which indicate what decisions are democratic and everything else is decided by operational need
since operation is the concern not profits, this means you have more revenue to spend on things like benefits and improving your employee's quality of life outside of pay
you definitely need an organizational structure and pay structure to be competitive and scalable
as someone who works for a co-op, we pay typically higher than local market rates, and we focus on delivering services to the community
and main issues are where capitalism culture interferes with the principles of serving our community/employees.
saying everyone gets paid equally and every thing has to be voted on sounds more like a weird cult
Well, I guess that depends on whether or not you think management is more burdensome than a non-management position.
But more to the point, it's... dubious to me that there can ever truly be a way of measuring, say, a programmers workload vs an artists workload vs a music/sound engineers workload vs a producers workload to safely assume that "Everyone is doing an exactly equal amount of work and that justifies everyone getting paid exactly equally." At some point if you want a truly flat payment structure, you have to break away from the idea of quantifying the workload in terms of "how much" the individual is doing, and instead look at the greater whole and just make sure everyone is aware of what is expected of them and does it, even if that means more work for some than others.
Can you be more specific? Which post(s) are you referring to?
two from nibel (about CoD selling well, it made more money than the Joker movie)
and then one about how NBA Live 2020 has been canceled
Even if a producer had more responsibility/workload (an assumption I'm not totally sure I'm on board with, but I can roll with it in this hypothetical), they also have more control over the project. "Financial" is not the only form of compensation that has value; "greater ability to affect change" has value.
The idea that the ONLY reward work can have is capital is, well, capitalist. It tends to flatten out and marginalize non-material benefits.
I also pay attention to the way my co-workers discuss work issues, and ride in to defuse dumb and unnecessary tension (because apparently very intelligent people are incapable of noticing that they are vocalizing only maybe 40% of what is in their heads, and assume that everything else is obvious and implied and that everyone is working from the same base principles, which is absolutely never ever the case); how does that factor into my job description, and how do we weight that against the guy who knocked out three feature requests in the time it took me to get two people to understand each other?
Basically post-scarcity fully-automated utopia can't come soon enough.
As for responsibility, well. I guess my personality is revealed by the fact that I consider responsibility to be tremendously stressful; I suppose you're right that other folks might have a different outlook.
I never saw any of that myself. I know a lot of the quests reference the Ship of the Dead that was stuck in the town harbour but I never expected or wanted to get there.
I just realized that we may have, functionally, played different games
I played close to launch, and there weren't zombies or really anything to automate. The whole thing was rather punishing. A lot of stuff might've changed in between when I played and when you did.
Oh I played at launch too. I just really liked the game. I love quests that take a long time to get done tho. I was done before the zombies were added so I'm not sure how much they even automate. But I believe you can build them and replace their organs so they get better and better.
I do agree money was crazy hard to get. It was the one thing I had to force myself to keep going after. I thought alchemy was needlessly complex as well but I hear they re-balanced that.
William Gibson could feel really proud of himself for predicting good.
lol if you think post-scarcity tech won't be hoarded and metered so that some people can be rich and some can't
or it gets distributed after Class War 3 ends with the overthrow of the NeoMonarchy for the third time.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
Death Stranding's 7-and-a-half-minute launch trailer: (There's probably a bunch of spoilers in here, but it's a Kojima trailer, so it will either be the entire story OR be a complete fakeout and none of this is important)
my bad they're back now, must have just been something on my end. sorry.
edit: fantastic totp, great job me
Duke Nukem Forever.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1666821776739358716
And I'd like to get back the option to disable the mini icons next to games entries in the list, because scrolling down is chugging really hard - it's why I had them turned off in the old version.
I havent even seen new steam and dreading the icons already because my library was already huge and has to scroll forever.
I think what my life needs right now is building and organizing machines and conveyor belts
Can you reposition the main starting base though? I want to be able to eventually put it on a perfectly level platform and not gross uneven ground
I have a 700+ library and the only things I'm seeing is that I can see the icons load in if I scroll really fast and that it's a little bit choppy if I drag the scroll bar to the other end.
(Dan Stapleton is the executive reviews editor for IGN)
yuck
Postal 2?
Steam // Secret Satan