mothcompute

great osdev actually 🏳️‍⚧️

@mothcompute

real internet bug

guys help im frozen in time

i post more on my FediPub Activityverse: @mothcompute@vixen.zone it is where i talk about all my fun projects

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mothcompute
@mothcompute
trainsfemme
@trainsfemme
sulcata
@sulcata

puzzmo

look. I don't have a horse in this fight, and I understand everyone's gotta make money. but there's something about selling folks on your quirky independent-vibe puzzle site - solve a puzzle for a chance at a key! get a physical postcard with your website key! hurry and get a lifetime subscription before we launch! - only for the depth of the whole project's already-established ownership by belongs to one of the biggest newspaper monopolies in the world that feels very weird.

like I don't think they "we're indie" and got caught lying but they sure as heck didn't make this information clear from the get-go. and I think puzzmo there's good value in what they've made, and they deserve both sustainability and success! but there's a difference between supporting a creator you like and giving the inheritors of William Randolph Hearst's legacy some walkin-around money

feels weird!!

update - a couple of folks have pointed out that there hasn't been any effort to hide Hearst's involvement from the start - I shared an example of one, and there's a podcast link the comments where Zach talks about it (which I have not listened to.) fair shout, this was an association I (and a lot of other people) didn't put much stock in. what I think IS fair game is that the site + project isn't "in association with" Hearst, it's owned by them, and has been from the start.

update Update - There's a reply from zach in the comments to this post. I don't think it addresses my fundamental criticism but I appreciate his response.

trainsfemme
@trainsfemme

to elaborate:

sometimes I try and put down my cynical walls, and just enjoy something wholeheartedly. without reserve. and every fucking time I do that, for a book, a movie, a youtuber, a game, hell, something as innocent as a fucking puzzle website, it's suddenly revealed that oh, actually, this thing was never genuine, was never good, or maybe worse, it was at one point, but then capitalism got to it first, and it was funded by some evil venture-capitalists as a deal with the devil and is now used as a vehicle to sell clothes, or the auteur was an asshole, a fucking asshole, or that the whole thing was just a moneygrab.

i just want a Thing to Exist. and Enjoy Said Thing. without the money going to evil right wingers and megacorps!!!
and
and
maybe this is naive of me or something
but i like the idea of someone genuinely making something cuz they want to make it! and sharing it because they want to share it! i'm not like against them making money or something but.
ugh.

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in reply to @sulcata's post:

helvetica
@helvetica

This came up on my google alert so i wanted to share a few reasons why we sold to hearst, and also say, im sorry that this caught you off guard, that was certainly not our intention.

  1. The biggest reason was that i really hated running a company. I spent most of my time on Puzzmo dealing with contracts and talking with accountants. It sucked. Being a CEO was not fun for me and not anything I ever wanted to do. We started Puzzmo with the explicit goal of selling it because we wanted this thing to exist in the world but running a company has never been one of my goals. What I want to do is design this thing and design games for it.. And that’s what I get to do now! If Puzzmo is successful I hope to be involved in it for a long time. It isn’t common that a game developer gets to design a platform for their own work. It is very special and I feel very lucky.

  2. Hearst has been an incredible partner. They have a huge vested interest in the area and they are not a technology company. They also bought us before we had launched and before we had any users. All of this means that they’re really incentivized to help us do the jobs we want to do and make Puzzmo continue to be great. They are replacing their previous puzzle offering with ours, which means they have a lot of incentive to run this thing for a long time, even if it doesnt become a giant megahit. They are also not treating us like a VC company, and the two people that I am working with directly at Hearst are both amazing. The one that is our GM is great and he’s the kind of person we would be lucky to be able to hire if we’d gone some other route and raised a bunch of money (which is the other thing we’d probably have had to do.

  3. Hearst is incredible at helping us get puzzmo into more places which is the whole goal of this project. Bring great puzzles to everyone. Help people feel comfortable playing games and understand that games are not wastes of time.

So i just wanted to clear that up — We didn’t opt to sell this thing to get rich, we built a thing that we intended to sell because that was the way we could get it into the world and have it be taken care of for a long time. I know there is a lot of skepticism around huge companies rolling up everything small, and I share that feeling! But this circumstance, personally, it feels different. We made this choice because it was the best thing for Puzzmo, the best thing for our relationship to Puzzmo and those things made it the best thing for everyone who loves Puzzmo. It was nice to get some money for this thing we have been working on, but we viewed that money as a hedge against this deal going sideways, not as the explicit goal. The goal has been to get Puzzmo the support it deserves, and that is how it has played out.

Like everything in my career, money is important because the bigger scale you try to go for the more money either is required (especially for a site of this scale) and money also tends represents your reach — but money has never been the primary goal, building great games and art that are positive for players and for the world, and uncompromising on those values is what I care about, and those are the reasons we did this deal.

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