Anticapitalist Tendencies

The stated purpose of a corporation is to gather up as much wealth as possible from society and dump it into the wallets of a few people.

Valve takes 30 cents of every dollar you spend on Steam games, billions of dollars a year. It built us an excellent platform. They have earned SOME of the wealth they collect. But all of that exists now. Maintaining it costs nearly nothing in comparison to the profits they still collect. Why haven't they reduced their percentage? They aren't creating game development grants with that money. They aren't supporting game development education. They aren't giving vast amounts to charity. They're just hoarding wealth, making a few fun toys like Steam Deck and VR headsets which are more profit-seeking products.

Anticapitalist Tendencies is a Social Purpose Corporation. Our stated purpose is to survive, thrive, and share. We want to gather some wealth from customers by providing fun, engaging products and use it to directly support creative, hard working people. Money is a collective fiction, but it is a useful tool to improve lives. So that is what we will do. We will ensure creatives have healthcare. We will give money to school programs in creative pursuits and other game-related charitable organizations. Our initial successes will build enough of a hoard to keep us running and anything beyond that we will send out to keep good creative people from being ground up in soul-sucking industries.

Productive AI (LLM) systems were built on naked piracy. The companies behind them stole the collective work of the planet and are selling it back to us. We will not use AI to replace creative work. You will never see art, hear music, or read text that was created by AI in our projects. Humans will bring their ingenuity, creativity, and passion to places AI can't touch.

But we will bend to the reality that AI can drastically speed up the most time consuming part of game development: code. With AI we can allow coders and non-coders alike to prototype and tune, tweak, test it in hours and days; not weeks and months. People who can't code can start creating games instead of waiting for coders and begging for their support. AI use is not ethical but it enables the mission. We won't claim purity, but we won't hide by neglecting to disclose this.

Real, human coders will still ensure our products are stable and safe.

People want meaning in their work. They want to decide what they do. They want to create and share. They are not 'less than' a boss, team lead, or manager and they don't want to be treated that way.

Anticapitalist Tendencies is an employee owned collective of creative, autonomous individuals. We don't all work on the same project. We don't decide what others will do. We don't hoard knowledge or have dozens of meetings in a week. We have a few projects running at a time, at different stages. We huddle on Mondays to pitch potential work to our co-workers but we individually figure out what each of us will do. We share what is working and what is not. We teach others what they want to know. We give people a chance to try something new.

We are all humans, we are equal, and we love what we do. We have no secrets. We all know how much money we have and how it is being used. We can all weigh in on improvement. We decide as a group on the best path forward.

A Corporation can be sued by its shareholders if they fail to take every opportunity to squeeze the wealth out of the world and deposit that into the shareholders accounts.

A Social Purpose Corporation can (and we will) decide to turn its profits into aid for others. We have to secure our own future or we won't be able to continue the mission, but after that we can donate as much as we are able. We can create game development grants. We can provide creative people with part time work and world class health benefits.

We don't want to buy boats and mansions and fancy cars. We can't make the world a better place for everyone, but the world is darkening for creative people and we can nurture them.

No one is just a painter. You enjoy writing and woodworking, music and cooking, archery and speedrunning. As such, we don't hire a painter and require them to paint all day. We hire people who are good at a few things they enjoy doing. We want them to do those things to help us achieve our collective purpose. That may mean they're painting on Monday, playtesting on Tuesday, and writing for the rest of the week if that's what they want to do and it contributes to the mission.