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Caption:

Hopeful parents

Alt text:

HELP WANTED SEPT. 2, 2005 /
NINTENDO EXPERT NEEDED $50, 000 salary + bonus Equal opportunity employer 555-[scribble] / IF YOU HAVE 50,000 HOURS OR MORE OF VIDEO GAME EXPERIENCE, WE NEED YOU. / VIDEO PLAYER dragon slayer $150,000 / LOOKING FOR GOOD MARIO BROTHERS PLAYER $100,000 plus your own car. 555-[scribble] / DO YOU LAUGH IN THE FACE OF KILLER GOOMBAS? CALL US. $50,000 yr. plus a free house [scribble] / CAN YOU SAVE THE PRINCESS? We need skilled men and women $75,000 + Retirement. [scribble] / SUPER MARIO BROS. Expert. $95,000 yr. Four-day work week + Ferrari / Expanding company needs skilled computer games expert. Call / DO YOU KNOW A NINTENDO EXPERT? Please read him or her this ad.

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It's not exactly the same but plenty of people make a living playing video games on twitch

Little did he know

Please read him or her this ad.

It’s not exactly the same but plenty of people make a living playing video games on twitch

"Plenty of people" is how many people? I mean, how many millions gamers are there out there and how many of them are making a living out of it? A million? A few thousands? Less?

If my question is half trolling it is half trolling only: as an old and non-gamer dude myself, I often see that kind of ideas floating around with younger people, that they could 'just stream' or become an influencer and stuff like that to earn a living because Such and Such are doing it already. So, my question is serious if its tone was not: what proportion of the population does indeed manage to become, let's not even consider becoming rich and famous (which a lot of people seem to be willing to become) but manage to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage by doing that?

There was no Twitch back then. There was no internet, in fact.

Video games bad

Also, of those who do make a living, the tiny .1%, how many of THOSE are women, basically selling cleavage and "just chatting".

Not knocking, but Farside kid has an uphill climb unless he wants to do a Fin5ter or something.

When was this originally published?

Comic is from 1990. The Internet was very much a thing.

I'm on the bus right now to go to game design school lol

The watermark says 1990.

For many Twitch streamers it isn't a full time job, but supplementary income.

Instead of image macros and youtube videos, we traded monty python transcripts and buxom line printer art.

Ok but in fairness the ads in the comic imply they want the best of the best, and in modern times those players do actually make a decent living and even get cars etc.

How many millions/billions cook food vs how many are professional chefs? How many draw but are famous artists? How many play football but become a professional well paid athlete?

Technically your example applies to basically anything any human does.

Technically your example applies to basically anything any human does.

Did I say otherwise? I made a comment regarding this specific remark:

It’s not exactly the same but plenty of people make a living playing video games on twitch

Insisting that 'plenty' was certainly not that highway to success I think too many people believe it is, based on watching a few successful streamers or influencers... Or, at least that it is not what those two parents in the comics are imagining it is and what quite a few of those youngsters I can hear talk around me about their own future imagine. Which is something that should be a lot more worrying to us, the adults (kids are more than welcome to entertain dreams).

How many millions/billions cook food vs how many are professional chefs? How many draw but are famous artists? How many play football but become a professional well paid athlete?

Once again, I don't say otherwise. But now tell me this: how many of those amateur cooks (or whatever) do you think imagine they will become chefs (or whatever) just because they like to cook (or whatever)? Not many... which is about right: not many will become pro.

BTW, as an amateur painter and artist I never imagined becoming a pro. I could not care less about making a business out of something I simply enjoy doing ;)

I mean it depends on what you mean by internet. There were BBSes but the world wide web didn't really start taking traffic from the general public until 93. HTML hadn't even been invented in 90.

My mother cut this out of the newspaper when it came out and permanently taped it to my bedroom door.

As a kid I remember being like damn Larson what I ever do 2 u

Now let's hear from all the game designers getting awesome pay and free cars!

Make sure you tighten up the graphics on level 3!

As we know if a hobby isn't financially viable as a career there's no use in perusing it whatsoever

There was no widely available internet, which is what would matter in this context.

Hideo Kojimi and Mark Cerny are a couple that come to mind but yeah not a whole whole lot of them do.

Edit: damn upon looking them up though I honestly expected both of them to be worth a hubdred or two hundred million but its actually $30 to $50 million which I mean don't get me wrong no one is upset making money like that but damn I honestly am super surprised it isn't higher especially the fact that Cerny designed the ps4 and ps5.

Basically any financial expectation you have of any involved field, the game industry will pay half

1990, but can't find a specific date after a cursory search.

The world wide web runs on top of the internet, but its not the same thing as the internet.

In the 1980s the internet existed, with forum-like things running on top it, but access to it wasn't widely distributed.

BBSes just used the preexisting telephone network. (Which, yes, dial up internet access later did too, but in the case of dial up you'd be calling the number of an ISP, and afterward your connection would run over net infrastructure. In the case of a BBS you'd be dialing the person running the server directly.)

EDIT: you probably already know this, but just clarifying for others.

Yeah, where's the version of this comic with a boomer sitting on a recliner for 12 hours straight drifting in and out of consciousness while a news channel drones on a TV?

And you know, those people are few even as states pour untold billions of subsidies to try and rescue naturally waning industries, subsidize sports in the pursuit of patriotic legacies, while the teams are owned by oligarchs who launder their money with untold billions in bogus art evaluations.

At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I wish people played musical instruments and interactive face-to-face games with each other in their leisure time rather than staring at screens.

If you liked gopher.

On other threads programmers were talking and that is basically what they said, they wanted to program the games but they were paid less and when they left they got paid way more.

Elon musk pays people to pretend to be him online playing games I hear. Pathetic but I would take the job.

The games industry is built upon the idea of exploiting the young and talented, and every MBA involved in management should be fucking ashamed. Games are the pinacle of the human persuit of increased leisure time.. When we do get to post-scarcity, post-work, its all we'll do together.

The money is the problem, as is the MBA mills churning out poisonous "leaders" with no grasp of their product, just knowledge of how to squeeze returns.

Everyone makes fun of coding bootcamps, but the MBA mills and babies first economics classes are fucking ruining our societies.

You are speaking my language here. For years I have been saying we have all the wrong people in charge. We prize the worst qualities in people while having contempt for true quality. From business to government to non profits, with a few exceptions.

We need to make our own organizations not run on the profit motive alone, it's the only answer. Socialism will not come in government, but those ideals can be ingrained in corporations whose motives are not the profit motive alone.

And I have you tagged with the city we both live in! I think I know the school. I had an interest, but I’m already 9 years into my software engineering career and the pay is too much to give up.

If you’re not in the Seattle Indies discord, send me a DM! Never too early to make connections.

(Also replying from a bus!)

We need to make our own organizations not run on the profit motive alone

Nice little business you got there, thriving. Would be a shame if private equity bought it now, wouldn't it.

We need to do something about the fiscalization of fucking everything before we start giving human rights to greenbacks.

We are in a society that has fallen prey to a memetic money religion and wishful infinite returns thinking.

I meant the Internet. So we are both technically correct.

If you are only connected by UUCP, are you on the Internet? What about if you are using http://www.nncpgo.org/?

Cool