Understandably, my apparent stance on payment “diminishing the quality of mapping” has drawn considerable confusion and outright ire from some parts of the community.
I’d like to explain where this comes from to better help people understand.
This will be a long post. I am a verbose person. I will try to keep things as short as I possibly can, likely unsuccessfully.
Founding before we start
I have been involved significantly in several other projects before (and during) my time with osu!. The entire reason I came to osu! in the first place is because the “free-to-win” model spoke to me at a personal level, given previous experiences I have had.
I want you to understand where these values come from, and why I feel so strongly about them.
Era
A game by the name of Era, was my first real foray into game development. When I started, it had a playercount of around 30 and a team of about 5 people. This later expanded to about 120~ players (though I am by no means claiming responsibility for this) and about 10 contributors/developers.
These people that I worked with on Era were foundational in shaping my ideas about artistic and creative license. Every single one of them was an enthusiastic and long-term player of the game looking to expand upon their hobby and help make it fun for someone else. I learned so much from these people. I was 15 at the time.
One by one over the course of three years, most of these passionate people that were gradually but undeniably diminished. A culture had arisen in the game of people “USDing” to purchase limited and unique weapons from other players that had been created in response to their achievements or victories in the game. Some especially coveted weapons or hats (and this was all in the time before the word ‘microtransaction’ was ever a thing) sold for upwards of $5000 USD between players.
An item I had helped create was one of these coveted items.
I will forever remember the day in RC chat where two developers got into an argument after the game’s administration chipped in about banning a player who had USD’d one of the other developer’s bespoke weapons awarded for a tournament win. Personal attacks between two former friends were thrown out, because one person’s work was being directly monetarily valued and the other was not. One of them left a week later.
Today, Era still exists. Its player-count is back in the low 20’s again. One of the developers mentioned above spun off a mobile game version of the game (with the administration’s blessing) using assets that I and all of those people had helped create. It has 70k reviews on the app store, an aggressively predatory monetization model and upwards of two to five thousand people online at any given time.
Unnamed text-based game
For the better part of ten years, I have been involved in another game mostly centred around a text medium to the point where I have signed legal documents preventing me from naming what it is.
This product worked on a ‘freemium’ model wherein players can experience the game freely, but spend considerably vast sums of cash on purchasing additional features to make their characters stronger - in essence, “pay to win”.
I was an extremely prolific contributor to this project for three of those ten years in an official volunteer role, and the leader of several in-game organizations for another two years before I became an official volunteer.
My passion for that game involved spinning “grand narrative” world events with a team of similarly talented and engaged writers. To this day, working with those people remains one of the most gratifying things I have ever collaboratively participated in my life. Between half a dozen other volunteers, we would write events that literally shifted the in-game world and helped bring plots that players themselves had been imagining up into fruition over the course of several IRL years.
I loved it. I loved it so much that I could overlook the fact that my writing was being sold to players as promotional items at regular intervals for sometime hundreds or thousands of dollars, none of which I ever saw a cent of return for. In some regards, my time at this game could be described as ‘readily exploited’, as my passion for their world and the project as a whole presumably made them tens of thousands of dollars throughout the course of my time there. At the time, I was so fulfilled from my work that I didn’t even mind.
I ultimately ended up leaving the project amicably after losing interest and wanting to move on to other things. I still play the game to this day as a player without staff association, but have noticed a gradual and constant decline as promotional demands ask more of the game’s creators to deliver novelty to their players month after month, both on the narrative and game design front.
At its peak, this game was host to around 500 players in a community where 20 would be considered “active”. These days, it struggles to breach around 150 on a good day.
osu!
I have had a tenuous and well-documented history with osu!. My “rise” from a heavily outspoken player in 2009 to leading several volunteer teams (with varying degrees of success) by 2013 and later on slipping into a full-time “community manager” around 2016 hinges entirely on the initial passion I held for the game.
In comparison to other projects I had assisted with, osu! even in 2010 and beyond was an absolute titan in terms of scale and scope. I was a fellow volunteer with dozens of other people from countries all across the world, united only in our mutual regard for the particulars of clicking circles, exploring new music and laying out the groundwork for a community so much bigger than we could ever be to enjoy the same.
For six of my twelve years with osu!, everything that I did was entirely volunteer based. I worked with people who genuinely cared because they genuinely cared, in a scene full of mappers exploring the beginnings of a craft that had not yet been fully unearthed, all doing it because they wanted to with absolutely no other reason to.
At some point around 2016, I was brought on full-time somewhat reluctantly, officially entering the wafer-thin boundary of people who have successfully converted their hobby into a job.
It immediately changed how I viewed the game. When dealing with people becomes a matter of monetary obligation, the entire dynamic changes. Things that would stir me to the rage and rancour which garnered my initial reputation are muted and dull - the opium of “compensation” blunting my emotional range to something that I have spent nearly half my waking life contributing to. The sensation is strange and tinged with guilt - why am I the one to ‘make it’ when I grew up with so many other people who did as much if not more than me?
I spend my time with osu! now labouring under this numbness in the hopes of creating the same fertile soil anew that I and so many other of my departed friends had at the beginning, with all the things we wish we had at the time. From accolades like badges, titles, contests, and more.
I help handle some of the most toxic elements of the community on a daily basis to shield our volunteers from them as much as humanly possible. Nearly everything that I do, I do to try and preserve osu!’s vaunted history of free and open contribution, where people can simply create and play as they will without any strings attached, where volunteers can get involved because they want to, without having to contend with all of the horrible shit that I had to.
So, what does all this have to do with why you think money is bad for mapping/the game?
Consider my experiences with Era, where the direct assignment of monetary value turned creator against creator.
Consider my experiences with the unnamed text-based game, where the steady, inexorable demand for monetary value month after month diminished the work and passion of some of the most talented creators I have ever been privileged to know.
Consider then, the growing calls for compensation in the osu! community from all fields, from playing, to mapping, to running tournaments and more.
Imagine my horror at an osu! where someone’s worth as a mapper/helper/host is not decided by the quality of their work in the eyes of the community, but the silent musings of their creator comparing the monetary value of someone else’s creation. This is already happening in real time with the tournament scene. Hosts are paying players to validate their tournament by simply existing in them, undermining the very notion of fair and equal play.
If the hypothetical OWC2023 tiebreaker is commissioned for a whopping ten thousand dollars between artist and mapper alike, what does that say for OWC2022, or OWC2021? It says they are less. The number is smaller. The ‘reward’ is smaller. No amount of mental gymnastics changes this fact. Once that number takes root, it is forever there, the creator’s work quantified by the value with which it was assigned. Tournaments become weighed by their prize pool instead of the quality of their presentation, passion of the hosts running them, and the struggles of the players playing in them. Again, this horror outcome is already happening in the tournament scene in slow motion.
The impact this will have on the mapping scene in particular is beyond my means to articulate fully. Mappers vary across the spectrum in terms of personalities and temperaments, but all of them share the squishy, critically-sensitive inner core that all creatives do. People create their best works when they are unbeholden to things - this has proven true throughout all of osu!’s history, with thousands of classic maps as testament.
And as the modern day advances into a clamour of countless voices, of artists continually sharing and comparing to one another instead of pursuing the craft for themselves - the very reason they began learning it in the first place - we risk drowning the future of osu!’s creatives underneath a tide of impossible expectations.
We risk turning osu! into something that it isn’t. You might think that getting a fistful of dollars in your pocket for your latest creation is in no way harmful, that there is no possible way that it diminishes you - how could it? You ‘made it’. You turned your hobby into a source of income, the vaunted endgame. You wanted a piece of that and rightfully so, and who am I to insist that you shouldn’t and that you don’t? You hustled. Everyone respects the hustle.
The thought won’t even come to mind when someone gets paid a little more than you do at first. Or maybe, they won’t. Maybe your creation will pull a veritable bounty. And maybe you’ll encounter someone else’s work that you adore as a fellow creative, and see a lesser number on it. And maybe feel guilty - why was your work worth so much, but this creation so little?
At that point, my greatest fear lives in triplicate. Three games, three projects, three labours of love, all set down the path that cannot be undone - the transference of creative liberty from the minds of creators to the insides of their pockets.
In my view, money ruins everything it touches. Art is no exception. I am no exception.
You are no exception.
Wait a second, why do you pay music artists then?
Because this is how things are.
Given the choice between individually commissioning artists or having a vibrant music scene with regular free releases to all osu! players that we could then reward exceptional tracks from, who wouldn’t choose the latter? It isn’t a matter of being cheap, either - one is a service and exchange, the other is a community.
Presently, osu! has a community in all other regards. Some people want to turn it into a rhythm game services fiverr-esque platform. I find that particular idea nauseating, and want nothing to do with it.
So what are you going to do about all this?
I will continue to keep working to find ways to give people who make awesome stuff the recognition and attention they deserve, as I have been trying to do for the past ten years.
On principle, I will have nothing to do with efforts to further monetize osu!. Some people are likely to believe my values here are regressive or counterproductive to efforts to “grow” osu! as a game. I don’t want to “grow” osu! into a sordid replica of the rest of the soulless services available on the internet presently - none of us in the osu! team do, that much I can say with certainty.
Should a time come where the osu! community decides that this is truly the kind path they wish to walk down, then I will part ways with the project. It would be a bitter and tired end to something that has occupied nearly half of my lifespan, but sometimes that is just how it do.
This shit is way too long. What’s the tl;dr?
Direct monetary compensation introduces unrealistic expectations that will destabilize the already unstable models of contribution that exist in osu!, pushing the game way from its core value of “free-to-win” and actively make it harder for new people to get involved in it. The tournament scene already shows signs of succumbing to this behavior as of the time of writing, between things like tournaments being judged by their prize pool values and insidious behaviour like hosts paying players to validate their tournaments by participating in them.
osu! is centered around unburdened exchanges of creation. Compensation creates expectation of payment, which encourages “objective” comparison between creations based on how expensive they are, which is completely toxic to creative expression in the long-term.
I also personally believe that turning your hobby into a job is one of the worst mistakes you can make and have cited past experiences as to why.
Why do you delete a bunch of tweets about this every time it comes up?
Twitter is a terrible platform for complex topics and my experiences with things can’t readily be summed up into “takes” that make any sort of sense without offending people I genuinely care about. I’m just not very good at articulating these things in shortform, and depending on your response to this, possibly not in the longform either.
I am friends with a lot of people that my ideals could impact negatively if misconstrued, especially as someone quasi-public with a reasonably significant following. My opinions on this topic are my own, and contrary to public expectation, I don’t impose them upon the rest of the team or the game as a whole.