Artists and entrepreneurs explore questions and ideas. Companies, for the most part, improve on what already exists. There are exceptions of course.

Art, new startups, and science are different forms of exploring ideas.

I don't think hobbies is relevant to the topic?

Yea maybe what I say there is confusing.

Regardless of whether your motivation is money or altruism or whatever, as an artist you will have to explore entirely new ideas. If you work for a company any exploration is much more shallow. There are exceptions of course.

Making a game that succeeds in the market would be awesome of course. But in my case I personally make games when I get obsessed about an idea.

Yes. Making games can be a lot of different things. For some years I enjoyed the coding part. Now I'm more interested in the world of ideas.

I don't think they are mutually exclusive. There is a bit of business management in art, and a bit of creative exploratory moments in what companies do.

Fully agree: art has a lot in common with some early-stage startups. And with science too.

That games are often marketed under a single author's name obscuring the crucial role of other contributors.

I think political inclinations are unrelated to your main point.

These last comments are uncalled for and dilute your argument.

Yea the questions we explore as game designers don't need to be about mechanics or gameplay.

They can be about specific feelings, about connection, about things we share as human beings, etc.

@droqen.bsky.social tangentially related to our recent exchanges.

I believe this already does happen to some extent.

Perhaps it's difficult to see precisely because their success metric does not involve publicity at all.

My question would be: do you think artists can co-exist alongside these linkedin, forbes 30, marketing people?

Also, rather than thinking how the world _should_ be, wouldn't it be more practical to think of existing gaps and problems and solve them?

I didn't jump, I was just answering the question about democratization.

But in any case, I think as artists we should prefer "lots of people doing art for everyone" over "few people doing art for the rich".

Take music for instance. These days there are more indie musicians than ever before.

Any explanation of this phenomenon would certainly have to refer to the profit seeking record labels and distributors.

You may love or hate how it works, but I think it's a fact that reach is larger than ever.

Unfortunately I don't know of any literature for the specific subject. My comment was based on my intuitions around the democratization of other stuff (visual arts, music, movies, etc).

Art and commercial products are not on a zero-sum game. We artists also benefit from the success of companies focused on making money.

Rather than thinking of a utopia where games are art, we should be happy to see both artists and commercial initiatives sharing this medium, like in all other art forms.