There was a thread on the old boards that launched off of a link to a now-defunct site called The End of Free. Essentially TEOF was a list of all the web freebies that were no longer free after the dotcom bubble burst. One post from the Colonel I thought was especially worth copying over here to see if it was worth further discussion (remember this is a post from April 2003 though):
[quote:f25fff2de3="joeymanley"]The most popular and lucrative form of computer-based entertainment, videogames, started out as a hobbyist medium. Sure, there was your PONG, and eventually your Pac-Man and your Space Invaders, but before that period (and even during that period) there were lots and lots and lots of free or near-free videogames swapped on floppy disks and BBS's. I am old enough to remember those days. The first videogames I ever paid for, I "bought" as part of an issue of, say, Byte Magazine, where they were printed in source code form (and I had to carefully type them in). In the earliest of early days (before my day, even), there were impassioned debates about whether or not one could or should charge for videogames, or any software, given the ease with which copies could be made, and the fact that "so much great software is free," or, "it's just ones and zeroes, it's not something you can hold in your hand."
Sound familiar?
There are still free videogames -- probably more than there ever were. But the ones that get the most attention (the ones that get any attention) are the slick, expensively-produced, extremely professional works that come out of places like Electronic Arts, Activision, etc., etc. The fact that there are a hundred thousand free videogames out there does not lessen my desire to buy, and play, Halo 2 one little bit. Quite the contrary.
I could be wrong, but I predict a similar arc for webcomics.
This is bad news for the hobbyists of the future. But it's good news for the hobbyists of today. After all, Electronic Arts, Activision, etc., were all founded by precisely those people who were hobbyists at the dawn of the videogame age. The keys to their success have been talent, enthusiasm, and the fact that they got into the field early -- before there even was a field.
Twenty years from now, people will be saying the same thing about some group of fabulously successful webcomics people. And that group will be a subset of the current webcomics community. It just happens to be impossible to tell which people in our community today will belong to that fabulously successful subset twenty years from now.
This prediction is not particularly idealistic in nature, since it ultimately points to a massive centralization of the form -- or, at least, a centralization of those works in the form that are considered notable. Yes, my efforts can be said to be helping to create that outcome. And I'm ambivalent about that fact. But what I'm not is idealistic. Some sort of centralization of interest around certain webcomics is inevitable. And so is the creation of a professional class, who will, by their nature, gather more attention, praise, monetary reward, and, generally, power than non-professionals. It's already happening. And, no, I'm not just thinking of Modern Tales and its sister sites. We're not the only promising business blooming on this particular frontier. Whether we (or any of the others) will be the Atari's and Commodore's of the future, or the EA's and Activision's of the future, remains to be seen.
Make no mistake: I am enthusiastic about this vision of the future. I just acknowledge that it's not a very utopian outcome or an idealistic worldview -- which, you know, disappoints me a little in myself. I'll get over it.
I used to be idealistic, too. And I also used to hate people who would smarmily say things like, "I used to be idealistic, too." But now I'm one of them. Ay me!
An interesting analogy, but not really accurate when you consider that games have become hugely complicated virtual worlds that require teams of people from various disciplines. Of course hobbyists can't compete.
Comics on the other hand are by definition a limited art form. They expand too much outside these limitations, and they're not comics anymore - they're animated cartoons, or they're games, etc.
Perhaps a closer analogy would be an explosion in popularity of underground, independent music. All these years developing popular music and a two piece garage band with three chords can still beat its heavily-manufactured competition. All of a sudden there is a lot of focus on the underground scene. The underground scene flourishes. Then, the focus goes elsewhere because fashion is a fickle beast. The underground scene dies out except for the very determined and the not terribly intelligent. Eventually the cycle continues ...
Yes but surely he's saying that larger sites that offer multiple comics, especially those covering certain genres, will be in a much stronger position than the individual with his own webcomic site. Which is probably reflected in the growth of webcomic collectives.
No, I don't think so. Collectives don't really make the medium any more complicated. A group of arcade machines grouped together are still either Pong or Tekken.
I think webcomic collectives are more like the "comics page" in your newspaper. Newspaper comics are syndicated and sold as a package deal to publishers. Usually it's one or two comics that stand out and are the reason that package is chosen.
Often a really popular comic will appear by itself on a different page because it wasn't available as part of the comics package. My home town newspaper HAD to run Calvin and Hobbes on a seperate page, because when it wasn't available as part of the package deal the vast majority of people threatened to cancel their subscription. That's the only time I've been proud of my home town.
I would hope that in twenty years there is a very successful core group of webcomics. A much larger and rolling in many more dollars core group of pro webcomics. Because there are billions of people that at this date have never read a webcomic. I hope that will change significantly by then.
There will always be the underground. Maybe they'll be called picture blogs or something silly, but free webcomics will always be around unless the entire worldwide structure of the internet changes radically so that no one can post anything ever for free.
There will be a bigger gap between the "mainstream" and the "underground" and even among the pro and hobbyists in those groups. That's just how it works at a larger scale.
[quote:a1e952e15e="spargs"]No, I don't think so. Collectives don't really make the medium any more complicated. A group of arcade machines grouped together are still either Pong or Tekken.
They don't have to become more complicated. The production values can improve and so on. the analogy probably should be taken so literally because games and comics are two very different animals. But centralised groupings of comics will be in a stronger position than individuals going it alone.
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End of Free
There was a thread on the old boards that launched off of a link to a now-defunct site called The End of Free. Essentially TEOF was a list of all the web freebies that were no longer free after the dotcom bubble burst. One post from the Colonel I thought was especially worth copying over here to see if it was worth further discussion (remember this is a post from April 2003 though):
[quote:f25fff2de3="joeymanley"]The most popular and lucrative form of computer-based entertainment, videogames, started out as a hobbyist medium. Sure, there was your PONG, and eventually your Pac-Man and your Space Invaders, but before that period (and even during that period) there were lots and lots and lots of free or near-free videogames swapped on floppy disks and BBS's. I am old enough to remember those days. The first videogames I ever paid for, I "bought" as part of an issue of, say, Byte Magazine, where they were printed in source code form (and I had to carefully type them in). In the earliest of early days (before my day, even), there were impassioned debates about whether or not one could or should charge for videogames, or any software, given the ease with which copies could be made, and the fact that "so much great software is free," or, "it's just ones and zeroes, it's not something you can hold in your hand."
Sound familiar?
There are still free videogames -- probably more than there ever were. But the ones that get the most attention (the ones that get any attention) are the slick, expensively-produced, extremely professional works that come out of places like Electronic Arts, Activision, etc., etc. The fact that there are a hundred thousand free videogames out there does not lessen my desire to buy, and play, Halo 2 one little bit. Quite the contrary.
I could be wrong, but I predict a similar arc for webcomics.
This is bad news for the hobbyists of the future. But it's good news for the hobbyists of today. After all, Electronic Arts, Activision, etc., were all founded by precisely those people who were hobbyists at the dawn of the videogame age. The keys to their success have been talent, enthusiasm, and the fact that they got into the field early -- before there even was a field.
Twenty years from now, people will be saying the same thing about some group of fabulously successful webcomics people. And that group will be a subset of the current webcomics community. It just happens to be impossible to tell which people in our community today will belong to that fabulously successful subset twenty years from now.
This prediction is not particularly idealistic in nature, since it ultimately points to a massive centralization of the form -- or, at least, a centralization of those works in the form that are considered notable. Yes, my efforts can be said to be helping to create that outcome. And I'm ambivalent about that fact. But what I'm not is idealistic. Some sort of centralization of interest around certain webcomics is inevitable. And so is the creation of a professional class, who will, by their nature, gather more attention, praise, monetary reward, and, generally, power than non-professionals. It's already happening. And, no, I'm not just thinking of Modern Tales and its sister sites. We're not the only promising business blooming on this particular frontier. Whether we (or any of the others) will be the Atari's and Commodore's of the future, or the EA's and Activision's of the future, remains to be seen.
Make no mistake: I am enthusiastic about this vision of the future. I just acknowledge that it's not a very utopian outcome or an idealistic worldview -- which, you know, disappoints me a little in myself. I'll get over it.
I used to be idealistic, too. And I also used to hate people who would smarmily say things like, "I used to be idealistic, too." But now I'm one of them. Ay me!