...Excuse me? You thought there was some sort of digital culture blog around here? Boy, it doesn't look to me like there's been anything going on around here for a while, but, okay, what the hell, I'll see what I can dig up.
The Humble Indie Bundle is a snazzy little packet of five independent video games. As a purchase, it's distinguished by a number of features that you can read about here rather than watching the pseudo-rap video on the website, because sorry, guys, but that is very terrible. Anyway, it is cross-platform (PC, Mac and Linux), the games are DRM free, you are allowed to set your own price for the bundle, and a portion of the proceeds are donated to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. How big of a portion? You can customize how much of your payment goes to either of the charities and how much goes to the developers. Sort of. You divvy up the split with an imprecise kind of slider bar widget so if you like round figures this can be sort of frustrating.
Now this is all fine and pleasant and I certainly recommend it if you have any inclination to play the games in question. But what it got me thinking about is how in this new digital commerce paradigm business the independent game developers are really standing out in terms of stomping on the notion, which is still generally being desperately clung to by the media conglomerates and publishing industries, that mature works - particular copyrighted packets of data - can successfully hang on to their legacy price points. A year, two out of the gate prices start to drop - 30, 50, 75 percent - or games show up in these sorts of rock-bottom promotions for a limited time.
Putting aside all old media conceptions it seems like it would make perfect sense- these products have paid their way, I'm assuming. They have covered their development costs and produced their hoped-for chunk of profit and whatever they generate from this point out is basically gravy. Promotion manages itself via the always hyperactive video game infosphere and, with the basic architecture of file transfer in place and bandwidth presumably on-tap and cheap (transacting bits being the business model of these developers), I'd hope the overhead on such a promotion would trend toward rock bottom. I mean I hope: as of this writing they have brought in almost $400,000, though on the other hand their suggested (to their credit quietly suggested with a very light touch) donation is around 30 bucks and by their reporting their average so far is around 8 bucks. I'm not actually sure their reporting that is such a great idea but there you go, transparency is a harsh mistress.
But as I say, it is a common sense that the media industry at large has been resisting like crazy, particularly throughout the last decade, and it bears scrutiny as to why independent game developers in particular are so far ahead on this concept - this concept that in most cases a piece of media is a thing that ages, and not like a fine wine but like a loaf of bread, and past its fresh-by date you only get to charge half price.
This is the humility I allude to in my title: to recognize that an infinitely reproducible piece of work is a commodity with a shelf life, it does not eternally retain full value, it is not some sort of sacrosanct chunk of metaphysics. I don't know the answer but several pieces occur to me. Independent game developers, quite distinct from old media producers, were I think completely ready, indeed evangelized, converted and committed, to abandon physical media in favor of digital transfer. Of course, it is pure useless overhead. Much less so than mediated music or books, I think people basically grasp that with software you are paying for rights to the data, not for some object. This makes people initially less resistant to a substantial cost for an ephemeral download, but that initial price may have less stability over time, unattached to the notion that "object X costs about $Y". Software invites the analysis, what is this functionality of this data to me now, much more than those occult entities, the Album or the Novel.
Perhaps less immediately transferable to other media, of course software is practically prone to a much harsher reality of obsolescence than most media. A book is a book, more or less, but after a certain point not only is a piece of software not up to the current standards, it won't even play on the current equipment (or at best, will play only with additional software). Beyond the nostalgia market (which seems mostly hardware/media driven, with little visible paying market for digital ephemera) old video games have basically no monetary value.
So here's a puzzle: compared to their retail value, video games are disproportionately resource-intensive to create as compared to, say, cutting an album or writing a novel. The product is subject to a much more aggressive value deterioration over time. Yet we're told that video games are eating the market share of these other media for lunch. Dear everybody trying to sell data besides the people making video games: you're doing something wrong.
