I was going to write up my thoughts about free vs pay to play browser games, and will do so, but also found an article that covers a lot of ground from a point of view I can relate to: Free vs Pay
My views are that I should get paid for doing the work of creating games. I don't care where the money comes from (except for I would prefer it came from moral work), but I do want some as compensation. If I came up with a good way to get money but not have players pay, I would do it.
I think that since the reproduction, distribution, and maintenance costs of electronic things like games, and MP3s and so forth, is quite low, we have to face that usually revenue from those things was used to subsidize creation costs. Now that that can't happen it seems more obvious that we have never really paid artists for the creation costs of their work, at least not in the USA.
Maybe a new system which pays artists to create things, and them lets the public get them for free would be a way to satisfy many people at once. I guess you would have to convince people to pay for creation up front. Would it work in general? Would you contribute to a musician's upkeep while he or she made a new album, if the album would be free to everyone afterwords? I'm not sure I would. If they were really great, and I had the money I might, though. That means most people probably wouldn't.
But what if people could do other things like cook meals for or offer housing to an artist while they made art?
-Jim DuBois
