Nothing stops a game dev company from operating as a cooperative

Apart from existing in a sea of capitalist companies than can ruthlessly outcompete them. Co-operatives don’t stand a chance.

Why not? Why do workers and owners being exactly the same set of people make it impossible to successfully develop games? This is an extra-important question to answer because a lot of these indie dev companies are a dozen or so people in total.

Could it be that the upfront costs, and the delayed nature of turning any profit at all (along with no profit being assured) means that getting paid a fixed amount to do game dev labor regardless of success is a safer option for most developers, rather than actually being a stakeholder?

paying the employees their share of the full value of revenue, minus costs involved in production and distribution and presumably some amount of seed funding they all agree to set aside for the next project.

That would only be feasible in a very small company, with sufficient profits to spread among the workforce.

Most indie game devs ARE very small companies.

But then, splitting the revenue means splitting the risk. So if the game doesn’t sell enough to recoup costs then the workers get nothing.

Yep, like I just said.

That’s the nature of dealing with a market economy - you make a thing or provide a service, there are costs involved in doing so, and if you earn more in revenue than your costs then you profit. If not, you don’t. Either way in a typical company it’s the owners that benefit or lose as a consequence, as paying employees to do a thing is one of those costs. In a co-op, those employees are the owners, and win or lose accordingly.

The whole tradeoff of wage labor is that you agree to do a thing for an amount of pay, regardless of what the employer gains from that labor.

I’d frame it as: you need money to live. Therefore, you suck it up and let someone exploit you so they can profit from your work, and give you scraps out of that profit.

You don’t have to - you could go into business for yourself. Make a thing and sell that thing, and reap the full profits of your labor. This is an especially possible thing to do in the game development world where some of the largest games ever literally started as someone’s pet project or as soe other project that got trashed and repurposed. The Warcraft franchise (as in WoW) for example, started as an attempt at making a Warhammer RTS that Games Workshop wasn’t interested in. Sierra Online started as a couple making PC games at home. Notch sold Minecraft to Microsoft for 4 billion dollars, and it literally started as a one man project being sold on a cheesy looking website for a few bucks.

You typically don’t get the full value of your labor, but are also insulated from business risks.

Those “business risks” only exist as a result of the same system that necessitates wage labour: capitalism. The risks generally have to do failing to increase growth and therefore going under due to lack of owner capital. A democratic economy has no owners, only a collective workforce who will together use their resources to fund the company and pay their own wages - this means there is no need for growth. That huge risk no longer exists.

Yes, yes, once there’s a communist revolution that actually results in “real” communism and thus utopia get back to me. But, umm, we’ve had several attempts at communist revolutions and they never seem to actually turn out that way, largely because of a combination of people being greedy (good luck fixing that) and communist revolutions tending to create the sort of power vacuums that lead to authoritarian takeovers in relatively short order. Although, under that system good luck creating games that don’t glorify the Party, because that is of course the purpose of all art.

Failing to increase growth is not necessarily a problem. Failing to generate revenue in excess of costs is a problem. The need for endless growth is specifically an issue for publicly traded companies, because the charter almost necessarily says the function of the company is to increase shareholder value, and shareholders are going to do whatever they have to do to increase both their dividends and hypothetical sale value of their shares as much as possible, because that is what most benefits them. The incentive model is a bit different for a co-op.

If this usually didn’t pay off for the employer, then basically every business would be a co-op

That’s not even worth thinking about. We live in capitalism. Of course working with a capitalist model would work best - it’s the only way to ensure profits for the owners.

Of course it is worth thinking about.

You’ve got basically two scenarios - one in which a business owner assumes the risks of operating the business and pays workers an agreed upon wage regardless of the revenue that results. In this case the worker gets the same benefit for their labor no matter what, and the owner is attempting to get more value from the worker’s product than he paid for it in wages, supplies, and materials. If he does, he reaps the benefit and if he doesn’t he eats the loss.

In the other scenario, the workers and the owners are the exact same people. Meaning the workers assume the costs of operating the business and the risks that it won’t result in revenue in excess of those costs but also reaps the benefit if it does. Sometimes this occurs as a co-op, but more often as an entrepreneur in which someone starts a small business in the hopes that they can generate revenue in excess of their costs and thus profit.

(because no one would be willing to pay someone to do a job if they weren’t willing to take a share of the risk)

You’re still assuming an owner. A democratic workplace wouldn’t have an owner - they’d all share responsibility for the business. And pay would be agreed democratically.

I’m assuming a free market instead of a centrally controlled economy. I’m specifically talking about the reason why we trend towards wage labor over entrepreneurs or co-ops, even in fields where the barriers to entry are as low as can be. Most of the workforce is unwilling to accept the financial risk of failing to generate revenue in excess of costs, and so sell their labor at some agreed upon fixed rate that they will receive regardless of month-to-month revenue for better or worse.