If you imagine a stereotypical economist, you’ll probably think of someone who assumes that people are rational and that firms maximize profits. This is one of those stereotypes that often turns out to be true, but creates all kinds of trouble because of assumptions about what it actually means. Profit maximizing is the less controversial of the two mostly because it lines up with other stereotypes about rapacious capitalists and doesn’t seem to be applied to anyone who we might know personally. Profit maximizing is a pretty good assumption for a lot of cases, but it’s not because it lines up with popular conceptions of business. It turns out to be a pretty useful assumption even for art games.
One difficulty when trying to do any kind of analysis is choosing a level of abstraction or aggregation to work at. Too narrow or detailed of a focus risks becoming a biographical exercise, examining what events in Greg Johnson’s childhood led to features that made Starflight a success. Too broad of a perspective leaves games indistinguishable from tea kettles and so omits important details like how you need to build each additional tea kettle to sell more, while selling an additional game costs almost nothing.
Assuming profit maximization strikes a good balance when framed as “creators act as if they are profit maximizing.” It works because most analysis is not concerned with interrogating a creator’s motives for creating a game, but is interested in producing a set of predictions about how creators might act in a given situation.
Creators — the objects of the analysis — disagree! It’s all well and good to say that firms are profit maximizing when we’re thinking of a big corporation like Electronic Arts, but it’s a bit harder to say this when the firm is sitting across from you at the coffee shop and will start yelling about artistic integrity if the word profit comes up. This is why the “as if” part is important.
It may be worth taking a moment to mention that there is nothing particularly wrong with being a profit maximizer. Some developers are going to be driven to enter the market because of the lottery ticket success of some indie games, and even more are going to want to be compensated for doing good work. Still, stating this motivation so plainly doesn’t harmonize with other motives for making a game, and people don’t want to be thought of as one-dimensional.
There remains a benefit to thinking this way in an analytical context though. Consider examples we’d be justified in thinking violate the profit maximization assumption: academic and art games given away for free. There can’t be profits if there aren’t revenues (we’ll refrain from classifying grants as revenue). These creators are clearly not profit maximizing, but it makes very little difference in terms of their behaviour, which is the real focus of most analysis.
How might a conventional developer maximize profits? First, make more than they spend. Second, take actions that bring in more money than they cost (additional marketing, for example). Third, find ways to reduce the cost of what they’re doing (usually through doing it faster, sometimes developing custom tools). For game developers this usually means making games, getting the word out, getting better at making games, and then repeating this process (with maybe some additional content for very successful games thrown in).
How might a pure artist or academic operate? Make a game, get the word out, improve on the feedback and probably repeat the process. While these kinds of games are not motivated by profit, they generally want to maximize the audience, and the creators usually want to continue developing these games either by expanding on the existing title or making new ones. While profit maximizing is not literally true, it isn’t a stretch to say that even these developers behave as if they’re profit maximizers since the behaviour is so similar.
Generalizations will always run up against specific instances where the behaviour does not apply, and so this observation is not intended to be considered some inviolable rule of developer behaviour. A developer might renounce all worldly possessions and give away their game. A framework that says this developer is profit maximizing isn’t very helpful, although it isn’t entirely clear what alternative would successfully predict such an abrupt shift.
However, we seem more likely to under-apply a profit maximizing model rather than over-apply it. Independent creators tend to perform many roles, including analyst, and so a self-conception that is counter to a useful assumption can get in the way. Profit maximization is a useful approximation for most developer behaviour, and it seems better to identify and adjust for the cases where it doesn’t apply rather than abandon it for the many cases where it does.
The benefits of allowing this perspective are really only felt once applied to an appropriate analytical context. It’s an observation that says we can take advantage of all the work people have done in the social sciences and adapt them to games without needing to reinvent everything from scratch.
Still, there are a couple of useful implications we might take away from it without applying a full analytical framework. First, it says that creative work isn’t some kind of incomprehensible exception. It can be understood like other industries and endeavours. Second, removing the cartoon villain image of profit maximization allows us to focus on what really matters. It’s easy to dismiss the actions of a company with billions in revenue, but when it also applies to an academic making weird art games, we’re probably dealing with a structural feature.
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