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- cross-posted to:
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Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them. Just launched today.
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Can we get worker owned game companies now?
Aren’t those called indie establishments?
Not really. Technically Bungie was “indie” after the Activision split and before being bought out by Sony and some of the issues circulating the news today were the same management issues they had when they were “indie”.
Worker-owned is a term rooted in socialism. It means the majority stake (ideologically 100%) of the company is collectively owned by the workers. Thus it means the workers decide what the company does and how they will do it. If an indie company has an owner, who makes the decisions, and employees, who don’t have a say in those decisions, then that’s not really a worker-owned company.
Worker-owned companies are certainly rooted in anti-capitalist thought, but they aren’t inherently socialist in the 20th century sense because they are compatible with private property
I think it comes down to whether you believe in market socialism or not, as market socialists and non-market socialists have a different understanding of private ownership. Non-market socialists, such as orthodox Marxists, see any kind of privatization as a negative and as such promote public ownership. Market socialists make the distinction between private ownership and cooperative ownership, because cooperative ownership still tackles the worker exploitation at a micro level. In a private ownership the worker is exploited because the owner of the means of production can use their power dynamic to exploit the worker but in a cooperative that worker is a part of the ownership which would mean exploiting the worker is akin to exploiting yourself. In that sense the worker-owned companies may not be compatible with orthodox Marxism, but they’re still socialist in nature.
I will mention that it wouldn’t be the final state of socialism, I don’t believe we can switch to cooperatives and call it a day. Marx saw socialism as a process and we should see socialism as a process. Going from private ownership to cooperative ownership is just one small step in that process. There will be more steps in the future that might eventually end up looking more like orthodox Marxism. So I really don’t see it as not socialist.
So Valve, as game devs?
No. The main reason people are worried about what happens to Valve when Gabe passes is because Gabe is the owner, he owns more than 50% of the company. Valve has done well under him but once he’s out the picture and that more than 50% ownership is transferred to another person then who knows if the company will stay the same. After all that 50 makes the decisions about the company
If that 50 was split between the workers there would be less certainty about the potentially passing of ice person because the workers collectively uphold the company vision.
I mean, unless something has changed in theater few years, Gabe owns only about a quarter of Valve
I have heard rumours that his son has a similar mindset. Though who knows, those rumours were on this site, plus even if they are true, he could just be pretending so that Gabe doesn’t look into other options or he could change his mind after being told some enticing numbers.
No company survives the third generation.
So communists? Thought we had rooted them out in the nineties. But then again lemmy is run by commie tankies while Reddit is headed by far right nationalists. There’s no good platform nowadays huh.
Bro… For starters, not all socialists are communists. This video does a good job explaining the differences. Secondly, there’s a whole other world I’d have to explain just to get to how “lemmy is run by commie tankies” is wrong. For that I’m just going to leave that Lemmy is FOSS, which means the creators are not relevant to the continuation of the project, and Lemmy instances are individually ran and can be used to block “tankies” like lemmy.world did with lemmygrad and hexbear. And finally most people have a negative view of socialism because they don’t know (because it’s not being taught) Marx’s criticism of capitalism that is the foundation of socialist ideology. Marx wrote a whole book on it called Das Kapital, but you can get the general idea starting from here. It’s a summary of chapter 4 of Das Kapital and you should watch chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 (In total doesn’t take more than half an hour) to get the general idea. So even if you don’t agree with socialism as a whole you at least would understand what the core issue is that socialism wants to fix.
sadly most indie companies are not co-ops
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Indie just means you don’t have a major publisher like EA, Nintendo, Activision, Ubisoft, etc.
Let’s go further. Let’s have worker-owned everything.
Worker-owned factories, stores, restaurants, etc. Worker-owned government!
Let’s cut out the people that do not work but take 90% of the revenue.
*Marx noises intensify*
This. This. This.
100% this.
Is a mastodon bot too much to ask? I don’t use reddit or twitter anymore.
Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.
We launch this week with four co-founders: Nathan Grayson, Gita Jackson, Riley MacLeod, and Luke Plunkett. You’ll also see buddies Chris Person and Alex Jaffe around the site. You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher and The Verge. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.
These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The four of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs.
This couldn’t be happening at a worse time for the games beat. There’s a lot going on: widespread labor organizing, industry-changing mergers and acquisitions, sweeping layoffs, and somehow through it all a ton of amazing new games from big studios and indies alike. We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval.
We’re going to do all that–and more–here at Aftermath. We know a little group of bloggers with a website can’t save games journalism. But we think there’s a better way than the exhausting rounds of layoffs and barely-functioning sites we’ve got now.
As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device. And you’ll be supporting new ownership models pioneered by our colleagues at sites like Discourse Blog, Defector, Hell Gate, The Autopian, Remap Radio, 404 Media, and others– new kinds of media companies that don’t just bring you good stuff to read, but are helping chart a new future for journalism.
Through our different subscription tiers, you’ll have access to articles, comments, podcasts, a newsletter, a Discord server, and more. We wanted to give you flexibility not just in how much you want to spend to support us, but in how much you want to interact with the community we hope to grow around the site. We hope you’ll want to talk to us, and to each other, but you can also just read the articles, where we’ll keep you up to date on the worlds of video games, board games, comics, movies and tv, nerd culture, tech, streaming, and the labor issues that surround them. We’re launching today with a ton of great stuff for you to read, and we’ll be adding more in the days, weeks, and months to come.
We have big plans for the future, too. We’re eager to publish freelance work, bringing you new voices and stories and supporting the next generation of journalists. We’re excited to hear your thoughts as well: the stories you want us to explore, site features you want us to add, the communities you want us to create. You can reach all of us here.
There’s no way to know how this experiment of ours will go. The past few years have felt like so many endings. But we’re building something new in the aftermath, and we’re excited to build it together with you.
THANKS
Starting Aftermath has been months of work, but we didn’t do it alone. We’ve been lucky to have the counsel of so many colleagues who paved the way, including Jack Mirkinson and Aleks Chan, Matt Hardigree, Max Rivlin-Nadler and Nadia Tykulsker, Jasper Wang, Jason Koebler, and Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny.
Our amazing logos were created by Andrew Elmore, and the staff portraits were illustrated by Doubleleaf.
Our partners at Lede created the site you’re browsing on and provided vital tech support.
As bloggers who’ve had to turn into businesspeople, we received invaluable advice from Anna Flewelling, Parag Rajendra Khandhar of Gilmore Khandhar, Bruce Mayer of Wegner CPAs, Jessie Rose Lee, and Courtney Waid of First Turn Operations.
And finally, we couldn’t do any of this if not for all of our friends and peers in games journalism and beyond, who put up with so much to make great work in ever more trying circumstances. If there’s a future for this industry–and clearly we think there is!–it’s because all of you are fighting for it every day, and lifting each other up in the process.
Between this and Second Wind it’s been a big day for new independent games journalism. You love to see it
Is this the zp landing site?
Looks like Kotaku writers. I’ll add it to my check in sites.
Second wind is the new ben croshaw (Yahtzee of zero punctuation) YouTube channel.
I’m excited to have a new reading and watching videogame journalism experience materialize in the same day!
His name wasn’t in the founders so if he is, it’s not public yet.
Always happy to see an independent gaming journalism outlet start up. Looking forward to seeing what they put out.
Oh hell yeah Gita’s there? She was one of the last writers I’d read articles from before I ditched Kotaku completely
Wow, that was fast… but I am IN!
Whoa, it’s been a LONG time since I favorited a webpage for any reason.
I felt like I just got knocked back to the early 2000s. It was a nice feeling.
