On the whole, I felt that nearly all of the points made here were quite salient, and informative to the decisions being made for and on Greenlight. Being only a consumer, I personally see nothing but benefit from the $100 fee, as - much like stated above - it keeps those with the intention of putting something obviously meant to clog up the service away (albeit, unfortunately, not all), and hopefully shows that most of the projects submitted will be 'truer' works with honest-to-goodness effort behind them.
There's one statement, however, that I believe shows a level of naïvety that I thought only possible of other sub-classes of popular culture (especially anime and other traditionally marginalized ones): O'Reilly's "traditionally poor people" quip.
That was the state of the industry in... never. Gamers will always pay for games that they want, given the (admittedly, convenient) means by which to do so. This has been proven time and time again by Steam, GOG, Amazon, arcades (before the advent of the affordable home console and true single-player games) and, hell, even Kickstarter. Those pirates that make these arguments now are lambasted by some of the only voices that the industry is able to call mainstream, and have increasingly few avenues via which to actually validate their argument or perpetuate their actions.
Admittedly, most of modern gaming's audience is made up of people living independently and with little disposable income to their name. Yet, when game sales are setting records in the entertainment industry as a whole, O'Reilly's argument becomes not only moot, but absurd. No matter if those that purchase these games purchase merely that game alone for the year, they are still gamers, and constitute full and legitimate members of the "hobby" and industry on the whole. Poor or not, game sales, development, and trends do not reflect this statement at all.
This argument would only make sense should gaming's sales distribution stratum look more like that of the Japanese import market (specifically anime and manga). Which is already drawn moot since that particular industry's dominant age base's sole income is considered discretionary anyways.
I am making a large issue out of a small one, yes, but in the (paraphrased) famous words of the Second World of Wayne: "if you publish it it, they will come."
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