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kleinbl00  ·  2925 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: On Let's Plays – That Dragon, Cancer

It is interesting, but it's also disingenuous.

I hadn't heard of this game before you posted it. In the past 20 minutes, I've discovered:

- they had an exclusivity agreement that they reneged on

- they were covered $104k through Kickstarter. Sure, 8-person team or whatever but I've done movies with less

- they have a documentary coming out in April

- Their game is 2 hours long

- it's fifteen bucks on Steam

- They've made a quarter million dollars off of it there

- The most watched "let's play" they have only has 2.5 million views which, from what I know of Youtube, is about $1800 worth of revenue

That's the thing about remix culture - someone will appropriate your work and repurpose it. If your argument is that your work isn't really being repurposed, yet people are still enjoying the appropriation, it's possible that your original purpose wasn't well-served.

I watched some of that let's play. It's a shitty-looking game with minimal interaction. It looks like you've basically got camera control over a world that makes Second Life look like The Matrix. And it's entirely possible that the rational price-point for the game is well below the $15 they're charging. A fee that, by the way, they got 2300 times before they even released.

And I'll be honest - there's something kinda icky about parents throwing a documentary and a video game release at the memory of their dead kid while they have two others that are still living. We all grieve in our own ways and I got nuthin' against that but throwing the composer under the bus is bullshit. He either did a work for hire and got paid or he's profit-sharing in which case singling him out is cowardice. Either way, the amount of revenue being "lost" to Let's Plays is low enough that this whole thing is tacky.