My business idea

[Lachu]

I have had crazy idea, so I ask for help. My idea is to make older and with little requirement games free in money, but with paid to vendors. I have no money to start company and to sign agreement with game vendors. My store will allow to download games for free and play it, when you have internet access. How I will offer games for free and paid to authors? The solution is in kind of games I will deliver. As I said, it will be older and games with little requirement, so computer does near nothing, when players plays. I will create an library, with download program and ran it in sandbox. This program will do science calculation, when player play a game. To play a game, computer must be connected to the network. Games will be free and for calculations I will receive paid, so some percent of this paid I will send to game vendors. Of course, library will guard to do not drop fps below some limit and change calculation thread/process priority.


Currently I have nothing, but only dreams. Because I no have enough money to paid game vendors, etc., I decided to use free games and paid contributors. What do you think? I think many people could pay to free software vendors in this way - they lost nothing, because in other cases computer will waste resources, but they give much.

[fluffrabbit]

This will depend entirely on what payouts you get for scientific calculations (or cryptomining or whatever). This form of cloud computing is probably the only thing that can compete with a rent farm, so it's better than trying to run it just on your own machine.

There is also GridCoin, which is an organization/software package that does pretty much this, except instead of games you get to watch a progress bar. Not as fun.

[drummyfish]

This is extremely bad.

• Your games will have to be proprietary.
• Your games will always require internet connection.
• Your games will probably become games as a service to prevent cracks allowing offline play.
• Summed up your games will help promote taking freedom away from computer users, forcing them to be online at all times (which is dangerous), and exploiting them for business.
• Your games will be used to do unethical calculations, such as crypto mining. Your clients will mask it as scientific calculations and by the pressure of competition you will be forced to play along. How, by the way, will you check if your client's calculation in a form of a very long and complex program is scientific or not?
• In some time by the same pressure you will also probably succumb to the temptation of abusing the control even more and start putting ads and spyware in your games.

[fluffrabbit]

I think it's a shit idea too, especially since my games currently don't perform well enough computationally to spare sufficient resources for "scientific calculations". But it's also good that OP has an idea and is working on it. Revenue sources make everybody happy.

Your games will be used to do unethical calculations, such as crypto mining. Your clients will mask it as scientific calculations and by the pressure of competition you will be forced to play along. How, by the way, will you check if your client's calculation in a form of a very long and complex program is scientific or not?

Just force the scientific software to be open source. As an example, a popular machine learning framework among non-programmers is TensorFlow, which is a high-level Python API that defers the actual calculations to GPUs, not unlike DCompute. It's a popular programming paradigm for people who work with lots of data and don't need low-level control (physicists, mathematicians, ML researchers). Those people use easy-to-use languages so they don't have to become programmers, and I'm sure they wouldn't mind sharing their code with the world, especially since it makes peer review easier.

In some time by the same pressure you will also probably succumb to the temptation of abusing the control even more and start putting ads and spyware in your games.

Yes, that's proprietary software, which I partake in. No ads or spyware in my software yet, but soon.

[freemedia2018]

In the wake of Microsoft rendering all books purchased from their store unusable, I wouldn't endorse an idea that makes offline games require an online connection to a particular company. That sort of things pisses off a lot of customers.

It's definitely more work to monetise a game that has the 4 software freedoms. Generally speaking, I would encourage people to find ways to do that.

Of course most people won't-- that is, most games will probably remain non-free. I don't think an in-the-middle solution like this one really helps anybody. It won't help your business or your customers. Perhaps some other in-the-middle solution could be called progress at least, but not this particular one. Maybe look for another way to do it.

[drummyfish]

Honestly as soon as you try to make business you're doomed to do evil, sooner or later, willingly or not. Ask yourself if you want to benefit yourself or benefit society, you can't do both.

To benefit society, make living, not business. Create a nonprofit organization, not a company. Make crowdfunded libre games. Get employed in a nonprofit or do something unrelated and make libre games in spare time. Things that don't scream money usually indicate the right direction.

(Sorry for the anticapitalism, but on libre game forums I feel quite comfortable voicing my opinions when someone posts about proprietary games.)

[freemedia2018]

To benefit society, make living, not business.

Create a nonprofit organization, not a company.

Nonprofits are subject to the same problems as companies-- they are essentially the same thing in practice, with different rules around funding. Nonprofits aren't a bad thing, but people routinely mistake them for being removed from the problems of for-profit companies. They can (and too often do) routinely "sell out" people just like any other organisation.

On top of that, their treatment of people working for them is often worse than a for-profit company might get away with. Nonprofits can be very exploitative of interns and paid workers.

Make crowdfunded libre games.

That would be a business.

or do something unrelated and make libre games in spare time.

Good idea.

(Sorry for the anticapitalism, but on libre game forums I feel quite comfortable voicing my opinions when someone posts about proprietary games.)

I'm glad you do. I don't think anticapitalism is anything to apologise for, I just don't subscribe to it directly.

The love of money, in my opinion, is the root of all evil. But specifically, I think this refers to money as a misplaced priority, not an evil unto itself. The reason I'm not an anti-capitalist is that I don't think the free exchange of goods and services is a bad thing.

Whatever you think of when you are speaking against "capitalism," I too am probably against most of those things, but perhaps not all of them. Corruption, for example-- is a terrible thing and money can incite many people to it. Money is just as bad a drug as alcohol for some people, but I'm not part of the temperance movement either.

I would support the creation of a "Capitalists Anonymous." If modeled after AA it would be a great start, as AA is not allowed (per their own rules) to seek outside funding.

[drummyfish]

Nonprofits are subject to the same problems as companies

Sometimes yes, they still have similar structures etc., you're right about that. Any good does some evil and vice versa, but in contrast to companies nonprofits typically do more good than evil -- FSF, Creative Commons, Wikimedia foundation etc. Nowadays they're the best way to contribute to society on a wide scale and make living on it. With companies, I have yet to find one that benefits society without hurting it much more.

Whatever you think of when you are speaking against "capitalism," I too am probably against most of those things, but perhaps not all of them. Corruption, for example-- is a terrible thing and money can incite many people to it.

I always find it very strange when people advocate free software and similar leftists ideas while at the same time advocating (or not opposing) capitalism, i.e. rightism. However I've found there exists a valid school of anarchism (which is extreme left) -- individualism -- that is for some kinds of non-exploitative markets (but is still, as any anarchism, against capitalism). I disagree with it, but it's an established theory of how society could work. Maybe these kinds of markets are what you mean when talking about capitalism? That would sound less confusing to me.

[Dirama]

It looks not bad. Anyway need to start from something small and then step by step!

[charlie]

There's plenty of businesses that have a tremendous beneficial social impact. "Doomed to do evil," is such a dogmatic thing to say. Sure, there's plenty of bad businesses and large businesses are especially prone to prioritizing profit over all else, but many new business ideas transform society in good ways. There's businesses based around recycling plastic, cleaning the oceans, planting trees etc. Ruling out founding a business as a way of giving back to society is narrow minded. Sure, it would be nice if we could live in a world where money wasn't so important, but it is. Covering your ears and closing your eyes won't change that.