PostiveNoise

I’d give a separate extra upvote for the cat participating, if I could!

Finally!

Sure. He made many millions of dollars within the first couple years of releasing it. That’s why he can pretty much do whatever he wants, including continuing to work on the game without charging additional money for it. And of course, it keeps selling more copies, and will for many years to come, so he has tons of money continuing to flood in.

He certainly seems like a pretty grounded guy, and it’s nice that he tries to be cool about stuff, including not gouging the player base for more money. Being an individual has huge advantages compared to being a corporation, in some ways. A corporation would pretty much be obligated to maximize profit. He can just be pleased that he brings joy to millions of players, and has already made a fortune.

I worked as an Outsource Manager at a couple of game companies (in addition to working for many years as a game artist). I outsourced mostly art asset creation, mostly to cheaper countries. It was kind of bittersweet, since it was clear to me and the artists at our studio that we were outsourcing really enjoyable work, work that our internal artists would rather have done than spend some of their time reviewing the cool art stuff these outsource artists created. But doing this allowed the studio to make a bigger, better game than our limited size team could do on their own.

So basically, I disagree with your premise. There are many sorts of jobs, for many reasons.

ok. I too am now imagining dinosaur hookers, and it’s not even the weekend yet. RARHH!

There were probably professions that long predate history, and any of those are a bit hard to prove. There were ‘shaman’ in pre-history, and good shaman were quite possibly supported by their communities. There may also have been things like dedicated cooks. Trading sex for food however, is clearly hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old, so it’s hard to argue that other professions came before it.

This article has some elements of truth, but skips over some important stuff. In particular, the odds of making a living writing books when on salary, writing the books for a big company or celebrities etc, are vastly higher than just writing your own books. You don’t have to beat insane odds if someone hires you for 70k/year to write books…you simply make that 70k/year. It’s the same as e.g. people working in the video game industry. The odds of earning a middle class income as an Indie Game developer are super bad, but there are many thousands of people working salaried jobs in the mainstream AAA game industry who are definitely ‘making a living’.

Also, this is nothing new. There is a reason ‘starving artist’ is a common term. For centuries, a lot of the most well known people in all creative fields were people who already had money when they started e.g. nobility, and some of those people were able to become famous, largely because they didn’t have financial pressures that the vast majority of people had.