Kind of, maybe? But while I think the labor theory of value is fallacious, I also don’t share the capitalist perspective that no deal where both parties are satisfied should be considered exploitative, unjust, or morally unsatisfactory. To me, the whole thing seems too complex for sloganeering or easy side-taking.
Because a bunch of you are actually friends, I’m going to bore the socks off you with a biographical excursus into the main events that have personally shaped my thinking on economic justice. 
But I’m going to tuck it behind a cut so it’s easily skippable.
Joel's ongoing economic education
Part of my college financial package was a work-study job as a dishwasher in the dining hall. When the college worker union went on strike for a better deal, I was broadly unsympathetic; the wages seemed pretty high to me already, by comparison to my (crap) jobs at TGIF and Ruby Tuesday – to say nothing of the poverty I’d grown up with in Nepal, where my dad had worked for a decade as an engineer on charitable hydropower development. The wages at my college seemed better than “fair,” by the standards of my thrifty Midwestern immigrant roots. On some level, I was thinking, “If you’re not happy with what you’re offered, just go find a better job elsewhere.” I was a kid who had no idea what that actually entailed.
A couple of years later I’d moved to New York and was supporting myself as a temp while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. My quick typing skills got me gigs at a bunch of law firms, and I got to see the jaw-dropping amounts of wealth sloshing around in the offices of e.g. Freshfields Bruckhaus Derringer. I eventually got a part-time secretary job at a class-action firm, where again I got to see huge amounts of money being thrown around on unnecessary stuff. The team there worked hard, but their compensation wasn’t a function of their hard work–it was a function of where they sat in the economy, able to extract millions of dollars from settlements that would give millions of other people a few bucks of compensation. They had competitors, all of whom enjoyed the same structural advantage, all of whom similarly burned money on expensive parties, meals, limos, etc. etc.
I was seeing firsthand how contrary to laissez-faire rhetoric, “the market” couldn’t be counted on to dole out punishment for inefficiency–that real markets had geometries that allowed people with the right perch to claim huge rents. It offended my thrifty Midwestern sensibilities way more than anything I’d ever seen from a union. Indeed, I soon realized I’d been dismally wrong to begrudge workers the chance to push for better terms, because that kind of organized push was a key way to dislodge money from the pinch points where small numbers of managers and capital owners would otherwise collect it.
Meanwhile, 9-11 pushed me off the fence into my dad’s footsteps and the international development sector, aiming to be a constructive part of the Afghanistan response. My first job there was with USAID agriculture projects. Thanks to the Gore/Clinton “Reinventing Government” push, these were now being implemented by for-profit contractors, on the pretext of injecting market efficiencies into US foreign aid.
What I saw (and wrote about) during my years there was a system that was anything but efficient–because just introducing the profit motive doesn’t generate market competition. The geometries of this particular market included high barriers to entry, a single monopsony buyer, and low accountability for outcomes, because the gutted monitoring staff of USAID weren’t enough to properly oversee the work. The results were unsatisfactory, even before contributing to the West’s overall failure there.
The first contractor I worked with at least had a visionary president who was keen for the company to be a sort of university of development, and I learned a lot during my time there. He was however soon ousted by a colleague who went to the shareholders and accused his vision of being a waste of their money. The second contractor I worked with was just a shitshow. Both had cultures of entitlement where staff expected their business class flights and climate-controlled offices, damn the expense; this was an ugly contrast to the reality of the people we were trying to help in Afghanistan. I soon jumped ship to the charitable sector, to a UK institution where service rather than entitlement was a sincere and core part of the ethos.
But the charity sector’s social conscience hardly made it immune to unjust economic structures. First, salaries set at a US/UK level tended to quickly get unreasonable when looked at from the perspective of either small donors or the people in high-poverty countries that we were trying to help. By picking my opportunities carefully, I managed a career that combined downward salary mobility with increased responsibility, until I felt that what I was earning was reasonably proportionate to the value I was adding. (This has had its downsides; my Afghan friends familiar with the USAID contractor system assumed I must by now be making five figures a month, and we were all disappointed that I couldn’t help them at the level that would have made possible.)
I also got to see the bad joke of “humanitarian localization.” By the mid-2010s, it was impossible to ignore the fact that less than 1% of global humanitarian funding was being channelled directly to organizations based in the countries where it was spent; UN agencies and international charities sucked up huge amounts of money that (given the realities of PPP, not just colonialist salary structures) could be spent much more efficiently by local professionals. At a global summit in 2016, there was much talk of a “Grand Bargain” and “Charter for Change” that aimed to bring the “localized” proportion up to 25%.
The actual fruit of it? Mostly, a lot of people in the sector finding ways to spend money on workshops and reports talking about how exactly we should go about doing localization…in lieu of, you know, actually doing it. These workshops are generally full of well-meaning folk who know that (a) their job genuinely does get help to people in need, and (b) they work very hard in a sector where they’re competing with peer agencies…and those two facts help them justify giving their tacit support to a system that still concentrates way more money in Northern/Western institutions (and with people like them) than in comparably professional outfits and people in the Global South, and accordingly helps way fewer people than it could.
(It doesn’t help that a lot of the expat charity staff involved in these processes don’t regularly socialize with people from the countries where they work, but rather with people in adjacent career tracks who make way more money – UN staff, diplomatic staff, USAID contractor staff. “I need/deserve something in the same general ballpark as they’re getting,” is an easy mental trap to fall into.)
Finally, I’ve also got to see firsthand how government regulation (which many of my fellow left-leaners are happy to prescribe as a solution to most market problems) can push out smaller actors and burden mid-to-large ones without actually generating much in the way of good outcomes. In Nepal from 2015-22, I was running a mid-sized, $10m per year charity with a team of a thousand-odd employees (mostly in our hospitals). We could have done much more good with less intrusive regulation–and the same was even more true for smaller charities, some of which had to pack up in Nepal because the burden of regulation was just getting too great.
People tend, understandably, to justify their jobs. When the value they’re adding is relatively minimal, that will usually lead to them trying to find new things that they can claim do add value; for someone in a regulatory role, that will generally involve oversight activities. But all of those activities, even when entirely well-intentioned (and not just a structure set up to elicit “facilitation payments”), suck up time and energy and (often) some amount of actual spending from the actor being regulated. I got to see this not just with my peers in the charity sector but with the small enterprises we were trying to help people set up as a way of escaping poverty; their greatest challenges tended to be the regulatory structure, on top of the inherent risk involved in starting a business.
So I’ve not completely lost my right-wing tendencies; running a small to medium enterprise (whether non-profit or for-profit) is hard, and regulation that makes it harder needs to have pretty strong evidence of generating actual positive outcomes before I’d support it.
All of that stuff has some bearing on the rest of this post, honest.
So Harris said something really important and valuable over on the subreddit:
It’s a lot harder than it looks to start and sustain a company like CoG. Most attempts fail, either by going out of business or by turning into wildly unpleasant and exploitative shells of their former selves. (And as the guy who takes 7 years to write a book and has a five-book series in mind, you’d better believe I value CoG’s longevity.) @adrao’s right that if you’ve never had to worry about making payroll and staying on the right side of small business law and regulation, you’re probably underestimating how hard it can be – and the impressive improvisation that the CoG team have managed in keeping the business alive.
Remember, when this thread started, 12 years ago, CoG was still trying to gauge whether there was a viable business in charging for its games at all. Highly active fans, not just 1-star goons on the app stores, were still arguing with me over whether games had a value that was worth paying for at all. Jason was talking tentatively about which games were worth $2 vs $3, and hoping he would be able to afford to work full-time for CoG the following year.
The way forward they found involved taking the publishing industry advance-and-royalty system as their model–which again, Harris reminds us, is atypical in the game writing world. CoG’s atypical strategy has coincided with atypical longevity and success. They’ve attracted quality authors, pros like Harris and Jed and Kyle who make a living from their writing, need advances to cover the work they’re doing while they’re doing it, and in some cases (as Dan noted with surprise) are actively suspicious and turned off by a no-advance-higher royalties offer.
And CoG has built this successful publishing house while also trying to stick to Corporate Goal #2, the Hosted Games one, which is I think worth quoting at length:
I think they’ve largely been achieving this (though as average game length has pushed higher into the 6 and 7 figure word counts, the prospect that anyone could have an output of 3-4 games a year has receded). But I’m not surprised that the goal of running a successful core business hasn’t been entirely and perfectly consonant with the goal of running an open platform that helps non-pros get their foot in the game writing door. Dan’s post has highlighted the main point of friction: if they offered a higher royalty percentage to HG authors than to CoG authors, they’d be undercutting the model they’re found that has worked for the core business – even though the central reason they switched to a lower royalty rate (the risk involved in paying advances to authors) doesn’t apply to the HG platform.
One risk that CoG might consider taking at this point, with the publisher model well-established, is adding a third option to the menu for CoG authors: no advance and a higher royalty share (which could then also be offered to HG writers across the board). Dan has written that offering high royalties without an advance looked suspicious and “desperate” to some pro authors, but with CoG’s much longer track record and demonstrated capacity/willingness to pay advances, that might be less of an issue now. Add an explanatory note that some of the non-pro writers and coders on the list prefer this arrangement (maybe because, like me, they finish chapters so slowly that the advance tranches can only be a nice treat rather than a living).
Regardless, like Jason wrote 12 years ago, HG writers who move on from HG – to an EA contract in his hypothetical example, or to Patreon and itch, as has happened more often in practice – isn’t a betrayal of the vision or business model. Let HG continue to be a foot in the door, and one which provides lots of services which can mean some authors are happy to stick with it, while others move on up and out. That might ultimately be the best balance between CoG’s not-perfectly-reconcilable goals for the business as a whole.
It’s worth noting (because I think it will be shaping how many people see this issue), that Amazon and similar platforms have for a few years now made it possible to earn a living as a writer by means other than the unreasonable luck of writing a string of bestsellers. You can do it by the grind, by pushing yourself to get new (perhaps AI-assisted) content out there constantly. HG is not set up to facilitate this model; the (even limited degree of) quality control and the small size of the team aren’t consistent with pushing lots of cheap content continually out the door. Personally, I’m glad, because I don’t think it’s at all healthy; but that’s a key part of the business model for the platforms people are talking about that take a much smaller share of the cut.
Finally, having havered even longer than usual (sorry/not sorry), I want to wrap up with a note on why I’ve always hedged my defenses of CoG a little on the exploitation front. I can and have said that I’m more than happy with the deals CoG has offered me personally; that I’m sympathetic to the challenges and costs of keeping a business alive and employees well-compensated; and that it’s entirely plausible to me that they’re profiting no more than is reasonable. If they’re exploitative at all, it’s certainly a lot less than they could get away with.
At the same time, as I spent probably too much time discussing behind the cut, I’ve seen firsthand how easy it is for well-meaning people to justify a flawed and unfair distribution of resources on the basis of I am adding some meaningful value and I am working very hard. I’ve seen how when the question of the amount of value-added is raised, the natural response is often to find new activities to do, rather than letting go and letting others keep a higher share. I’ve seen how it’s easy to compare yourself to other people doing similar work (e.g. perhaps “the CEO of that other software startup”) and making much more money for it.
Am I 100% confident that CoG hasn’t fallen into any of those traps, leading to it being less effective than it could be in its stated mission of helping authors (HG in particular) make a living from their creative work? No; I don’t see the numbers that would let me answer that question. That’s ultimately an issue that Jason, Dan, and team need to grapple with themselves. Even so, I’m broadly happy with the company, think it’s overall a force for good, and am very grateful for the opportunity it’s given me to find a wider audience for (and a generous income from) my writing.