The Business: Soon Big Studios Will Be Irrelevant

When I point out that the tools now exist to create professional-grade entertainment at home on a shoestring, it's not just things like Astartes. Using just Source Filmmaker and some additional assets, 40K fans make plenty of short films and animated skits. This one? Posted to YouTube--as of this post--three days ago.

That doesn't take millions or billions of dollars. That doesn't take massive teams of professionals all working on massive desktop stations using Adobe Cloud shit and other expensive commercial programs. This is one dude, on his own, making use of stuff others like him previously created--with credit; see the Description--making a complete short film with a definitive beginning, middle, and end.

Yes, this--again--is on par with stuff Games Workshop cuts checks to have done for them, when it doesn't surpass that level as Astartes does.

What I want to point out by hammering on this is that just as we can now freely write novels without having to rely on some massive publisher to deign to give us crumbs in return for the valuable properties we create, neither do we need to rely on massive studios anymore to produce and distribute our creations either. What we have to have is skill and time, but in terms of money? Nowhere near that stupid degree of cost is required.

Business-minded creators--which had better be you if you want what you make to pay your bills--should keep an eye on developments like this, as well as on the Print On Demand merchandise side of things. That creates voids, and voids mean opportunity as well as danger, but that's for another post.