The makers of Gears of War stated that their game is about "loss and redemption" (while everybody else calls it a brainless shooter with everything designed for maximum appeal to the lowest common denominator), I don't see how that needs explicit chainsaw violence. Had the ESRB told them to cut something to avoid an AO rating I'm pretty sure they'd have done it without delay.
Meh, not that I really care, I've got more than enough generic shooters about generic big bulky dudes doing generic macho things and am more annoyed by the lack of Dead Rising.
Creating a game is expensive. If you are creating a game that you already know is only going to appeal to a niche market then the only chance you have of making a profit is to price the game higher.
Because many people declare the HD consoles as hardcore and the Wii as casual. My personal definition of hardcore doesn't match that either but when people argue about "destroying gaming" those are the definitions that come into play. It's not really possible to argue what'll happen and what not if we can't even use the same words. The business terminology is core and new market with the core being pretty much everything from the last gen and anything that's just an incremential improvement of last gen stuff while the new market is the market the Wii branched out into.
These days people declare themselves hardcore after playing Halo and GTA, that's the kind of hardcore that'll suffer.
That's why I think Excite Truck is more fun and lament the long delay for the European release of Excite Bots. Those games don't pull massive rubberbanding to give the rear spots a chance, they simply make it possible to win without being the first to finish. The Excite games use a score system where you score stars for all kinds of actions (including of course a good placement across the finish line) and thus even when you're behind and can't go fast enough to catch up you can still win on points (or lose) and have something to do in the rear spots as well.
I think the hardcore games this is talking about are the games with hollywood-level budgets aimed at the old niche. Hollywood doesn't do that, the "art" movies and such are made on MUCH smaller budgets than summer blockbusters because niche movies only get niche sales. Of course niche games that get developed as niche games will sell well enough to cover their costs (games like No More Heroes were developed for niche appeal and the dev was happy with sales of half a million and probably made a profit too, you just have to realize beforehand that you're going for a niche) and probably make a tidy profit but the kind of games we're seeing on the HD consoles doesn't scale its budget to the audience and thus ends up with trouble making money. That's not saying no games scale to their audience but it seems many forget that.
It's the other way around. You describe the situation as MS and Sony making advances while Nintendo retreats but the situation is reversed. MS and Sony aren't making inroads into the new market, they're throwing out a few half-assed attempts in order to make a quick grab of that segment but they're not really having much success (sure, SingStar and Buzz sell but those are on the PS2 already and the PS2 does them perfectly, that's a terrible starting point for selling PS3s!) because they don't bother understanding it, all they do is ape a few successful things and occassionally make some kind of "hey, don't forget us!" press release (I recall MS trying desperately to make the XBox 1 appear family friendly in press releases, perhaps because they noticed the system got stuck in a niche and cannot beat the PS2 like that). Meanwhile Nintendo is expanding upmarket, they are making WAY more core games than new market games while also refining their technology to allow more advanced games with it. Look at the situation, the best the HD companies could produce was essentially the Freestyle Pro with analog sticks taped on while Nintendo is already entering the second generation of hardware in the new market (Wii Motion Plus, when the advances are controller driven instead of console driven a new controller is pretty much like a new console).
This does not mean it will continue expanding, again as the parent says and if anything I'd say it has limited scope due to the fact casual games tend to cut away the storyline element, and there's only so many games of the same genre you'll want to buy if there's not even a story differentiating them from each other which is a common difference between a lot of casual and hardcore games.
The solution is to invent new genres or at least new experiences even if they can be grouped into the old genres. Newer technology also allows more advanced games and thus new games people want to buy. Hell, everything before the PS1/N64 era almost entirely consisted of games with stories that were one page of text in the manual or the title screen and never seen again afterwards.
To give an example in numbers, what I'm saying is that the hardcore section of the market makes it's profits by selling 10 different games to each of 10 different users, whilst the casual market makes it's profits by selling 1 game to 100 users - both shift as many units, but in a different manner.
The problem with that is that hardcore games cost 25 million dollars on average to make while new market games can be made on less than one. It's not good to throw 250 million at development to make the revenue you could make with one million invested differently. Okay, as games advance this disparity will not remain as huge (Wii games will go up to ~10 million USD) but the new market is still cheaper to serve and includes more people than the core market.
One final point about TFA is that I'm a little dubious on his definition of hardcore, in fact, I'm convinced some of his examples can't even be defined as one or the other - Rock Band appeals as much to hardcore gamers as it does casual gamers, you can't simply call it a casual game and hold it up as a pinnacle of success in the casual gaming world when I'd wager a bet, many of the people who bought it are in fact hardcore gamers who are also still buying the Call of Duty, Killzones and Halos of the world as well.
That's because the new market and core market customers are not two disjunct groups. Hell, I'm pretty sure plenty of "hardcore" gamers have bought Wii Sports and enjoyed it. However the big successes have appealed to everyone, not just one group and that appeal to everyone cannot be gained from making a "hardcore" game. A game with blood everywhere will alienate a significant chunk of the population, a game with a family-friendly setting (doesn't mean SatAM-style childishness) will only alienate a few people. A game with lengthy movie sequences and top of the line graphics will bore a lot of people massively while a g
Or maybe it has to do with there being no major Wii game releases in several months? Yes, there was Wii Music but that fell pretty flat (can't have a smash hit every single time) and didn't really sell systems. The release drought on the Wii simply prevented the Wii from increasing in appeal in that period of time and thus sales slowed down as the number of appealed-to-but-not-sold-to people ran low. This has nothing to do with "casual" gamers losing interest and everything to do with there simply being no games for them to be interested in.
If you want anecdotes here's mine: When the Wii drought kept going for too long I bought a 360 (it was fairly cheap, 200€ for the 60GB Pro, down from 240€) to expand the library I can buy titles from. Because I couldn't find anything interesting on the shelves I got some points for XBLA and my first game on this brand new HD gaming system was a port of a Playstation 1 game that I bought because I liked the sequels on the handhelds (CvSotN), now capable of displaying its 320x240 graphics in glorious HD. Maybe it's the way demos are set up on the system but only one of the six retail games I bought had a demo, most of the demos I played ended up repelling me from the game. By now I've really enjoyed two retail games on the system and liked three downloadable games quite a bit, I've still spent 30€ less on games than the console itself. Played the games I liked to the exhaustion point (either the ending or where they got boring) and now the thing's collecting metaphorical dust. It simply has a total lack of games, anything good is available on the PC as well and costs 20€ less there (with much faster pricedrops so even bigger savings if you wait for the bargain bin). I'm sure someone would be inclined to point at Gears of War now but guess what, they didn't even release that in this country (because reducing the violence would mean "compromising their artistic vision", whatever the vision behind a game about space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs is*...). Meanwhile my Wii kept accumulating games, both retail and downloadable despite being in a release drought (WiiWare wasn't in a drought and many older retail games kept falling into the bargain bins).
*=Speaking of space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs, Dawn of War 2 got a 16 rating, Gears of War was apparetly too violent even for an 18 rating. Seriously, a freaking Warhammer 40k game passed as 16 without any censoring and they can't get Gears of War into a sane range?
The recommended use of Wii Fit is 30-60 minutes every day, the game actually complains when you miss a day. That's 3.5-7 hours per week plus whatever you spend on other games.
That's the mistake of equating a market segment and a playstyle. The "casual gamers" people talk about when they talk about markets are simply people who prefer games considered crap by the older gamers (who call themselves hardcore) and to reinforce their superiority the hardcore invents concepts like "these people only care for gaming for a few weeks then we will dominate again". The "casual gamer" isn't necessarily casual, that's just a stereotype built up by detractors who want to sweep this massive market under the rug to get more attention from the game industry and media. It's been argued that the "new" games aren't even new, they're just a new wrap on arcade-style gaming. Gaming "outgrew" the simple fun of the arcade and with that left a lot of the people behind who were just not interested in this whole "games are art" masturbation and would rather play something that starts with the fun right away and then challenges the player's ability.
I'd say the loss of time has already happened, people (well, veteran gamers) demand games where they can progress every time they play with not much learning required. Meanwhile "casual" games are all about applying your skill. A single match may only last a few minutes but to progress (beat your own highscore) you must improve yourself.
That's because the term "casual" is misleading. They only have a casual interest in the "gamer lifestyle" but they do focus a lot on a single game when they play one.
The death of hardcore gaming is happening because of the rising dev costs with stagnating sales. The core market is limited in size, it's not really growing much and as such the sales are limited. The focus on graphics among the HD consoles massively increases the development costs (factor 2.5) while very few additional sales are gained from the better graphics (and few sales are lost by having weaker graphics). Without casual gaming it wouldn't survive either because it's collapsing under its own weight, not anything else's.
The success of "casual" gaming merely comes from the massive numbers of people outside the core market who were previously unwilling to buy games. However, their demands aren't going to stay rock-bottom forever and producing highly profitable games with a cheap and crappy dev team in a few months won't work forever. While more complex games aimed at these people will have to look different from the ones that are being aimed at the hardcore they're by no means impossible. Applying the term "casual" however is wrong, these people can and will get very involved in a game they play, possibly moreso than "hardcore" gamers judging by the difficulty modern core games are dumbed down to. That should be considered, we're not talking about people who play a game for five minutes and then put it on a shelf, they've got attention spans much longer than the traditional gamers though they may have less time per game session.
Er, you realise that in order to download something, someone had to upload it, right?
Yes but the point is that the person who uploaded it is the copyright infringer, not the one who downloaded it (in part because the downloader can't know whether the uploader had a license for that material/the download contains infringing material though some countries have added laws that punish the downloader when it's reasonably obvious that the uploader didn't).
Also I don't think you get one count of infringement for ever copy you make, only for every work you make copies of.
The ones who are easy to track are the folks at TPB. Even if they didn't commit the crimes themselves, it would be hard to argue that they were not accomplices, facilitating those crimes, and doing so on purpose to make a lot of money. If you want to argue otherwise, you are either incredibly naive or are being intellectually dishonest.
I got my share of downmods for having that oppinion already, I'm not arguing that the TPB guys are in any way innocent. Geeks tend to focus on the tech approach but like the "make your cat accept the EULA" nonsense the law isn't easily tricked (and even if, I'm of the oppinion that it's completely within the rights of a judge to punish a tech-dodger as the law would have punished such a person anyway had it been written with the necessary tech knowledge/at a time when that tech existed and would prefer to see some anti-loophole laws, this applies in both directions though, the companies try to deny the customer rights granted by the law by using technical measures to circumvent legal protections and I'd like to see that made punishable).
2) Also, are we now assuming that the masses are no longer responsible for their own actions? If I download a file or video from a site, and the material is copyrighted, does that mean that I'm not to blame anymore?
Unless you're in one of the countries that added special rules for it you weren't in first place. Copyright only applies to the distribution, not the receipt of copies. On P2P systems downloading often implies uploading but many defenses rested on the fact that only uploading is against the law and that could often not be proven.
Then again sentences are based a lot on the judge's gut feeling anyway, while the law may prescribe different ranges based on the facts it's still up to the judge to decide where to go inside that range.
The billions and trillions just handed out don't count towards this budget deficit and it's as large of a difference between unfunded spending and the economy as when we were fighting a world war in two hemispheres of the globe.
But now the US is fighting in THREE hemispheres of the globe!
Because the creator may be completely overwhelmed by the whole work needed to actually distribute the work and all that and would rather take a lump sum, then get to work on the next thing? That way creators can focus on creating and people who know how to sell stuff can work on the selling instead of forcing one individual to learn all the aspects of every step involved and being completely distracted by all that so they don't do more of the thing they're good at.
From a macro economic point of view copyright is roughly equivalent to an arbitrary sales tax on specific items, with an efficiency rate of about 5% of the collected funds going towards the stated (as opposed to actual, of course) purpose of copyright.
Copyright is a wrapper to allow ideas to be traded like any physical good and thus apply capitalist mechanics to them (e.g. desirable works prosper, undesirable works fail). Like any product the workers that produce it get paid by the company, not by the buyers. The company makes money on the sales and uses that money to pay all the expenses any business incurrs. How much of the money that you spend on anything you buy in a store actually goes to the workers who create the physical object? Is it sufficient to merely create the physical object or is there maybe more work involved to actually getting that product into your possession? Like, say, letting you know it exists and maintaining the whole logistics chain to actually move it from the factory to a place where you can pick it up and pay for it? Maybe even that place itself?
The grunts in a copyright-producing company also get their salaries and they get them no matter how their product performs unless the whole department stops making money and gets axed. Yeah, musicians have a tendency to negotiate terrible contracts that pay terribly but they didn't have to sign those, it's perfectly possible to skip having a label and do all the promotion and distribution yourself (of course that's a lot of work but that's why so many sign up for the lazy option) or maybe negotiate a better contract (provided your offering is sufficiently superior to the offerings of your competitors that you can charge significantly more for it). There's no mechanism in place that makes it impossible to hold a copyright without signing up to a "no money for you" contract, you can hold a copyright easily. Of course it's not easy to utilize but I recall it saying "pursuit of happyness", not "happyness handed to them on a silver platter".
The large corporate machination that eats the money manages to survive for a reason: It does work the artists and creators don't. It also employs the artists and creators to create works they wouldn't want to create on their own accord but that the public at large desires.
Slashdot Mirror
The makers of Gears of War stated that their game is about "loss and redemption" (while everybody else calls it a brainless shooter with everything designed for maximum appeal to the lowest common denominator), I don't see how that needs explicit chainsaw violence. Had the ESRB told them to cut something to avoid an AO rating I'm pretty sure they'd have done it without delay.
Meh, not that I really care, I've got more than enough generic shooters about generic big bulky dudes doing generic macho things and am more annoyed by the lack of Dead Rising.
Creating a game is expensive. If you are creating a game that you already know is only going to appeal to a niche market then the only chance you have of making a profit is to price the game higher.
Or cutting costs.
Because many people declare the HD consoles as hardcore and the Wii as casual. My personal definition of hardcore doesn't match that either but when people argue about "destroying gaming" those are the definitions that come into play. It's not really possible to argue what'll happen and what not if we can't even use the same words. The business terminology is core and new market with the core being pretty much everything from the last gen and anything that's just an incremential improvement of last gen stuff while the new market is the market the Wii branched out into.
These days people declare themselves hardcore after playing Halo and GTA, that's the kind of hardcore that'll suffer.
That's why I think Excite Truck is more fun and lament the long delay for the European release of Excite Bots. Those games don't pull massive rubberbanding to give the rear spots a chance, they simply make it possible to win without being the first to finish. The Excite games use a score system where you score stars for all kinds of actions (including of course a good placement across the finish line) and thus even when you're behind and can't go fast enough to catch up you can still win on points (or lose) and have something to do in the rear spots as well.
I think the hardcore games this is talking about are the games with hollywood-level budgets aimed at the old niche. Hollywood doesn't do that, the "art" movies and such are made on MUCH smaller budgets than summer blockbusters because niche movies only get niche sales. Of course niche games that get developed as niche games will sell well enough to cover their costs (games like No More Heroes were developed for niche appeal and the dev was happy with sales of half a million and probably made a profit too, you just have to realize beforehand that you're going for a niche) and probably make a tidy profit but the kind of games we're seeing on the HD consoles doesn't scale its budget to the audience and thus ends up with trouble making money. That's not saying no games scale to their audience but it seems many forget that.
It's the other way around. You describe the situation as MS and Sony making advances while Nintendo retreats but the situation is reversed. MS and Sony aren't making inroads into the new market, they're throwing out a few half-assed attempts in order to make a quick grab of that segment but they're not really having much success (sure, SingStar and Buzz sell but those are on the PS2 already and the PS2 does them perfectly, that's a terrible starting point for selling PS3s!) because they don't bother understanding it, all they do is ape a few successful things and occassionally make some kind of "hey, don't forget us!" press release (I recall MS trying desperately to make the XBox 1 appear family friendly in press releases, perhaps because they noticed the system got stuck in a niche and cannot beat the PS2 like that). Meanwhile Nintendo is expanding upmarket, they are making WAY more core games than new market games while also refining their technology to allow more advanced games with it. Look at the situation, the best the HD companies could produce was essentially the Freestyle Pro with analog sticks taped on while Nintendo is already entering the second generation of hardware in the new market (Wii Motion Plus, when the advances are controller driven instead of console driven a new controller is pretty much like a new console).
This does not mean it will continue expanding, again as the parent says and if anything I'd say it has limited scope due to the fact casual games tend to cut away the storyline element, and there's only so many games of the same genre you'll want to buy if there's not even a story differentiating them from each other which is a common difference between a lot of casual and hardcore games.
The solution is to invent new genres or at least new experiences even if they can be grouped into the old genres. Newer technology also allows more advanced games and thus new games people want to buy. Hell, everything before the PS1/N64 era almost entirely consisted of games with stories that were one page of text in the manual or the title screen and never seen again afterwards.
To give an example in numbers, what I'm saying is that the hardcore section of the market makes it's profits by selling 10 different games to each of 10 different users, whilst the casual market makes it's profits by selling 1 game to 100 users - both shift as many units, but in a different manner.
The problem with that is that hardcore games cost 25 million dollars on average to make while new market games can be made on less than one. It's not good to throw 250 million at development to make the revenue you could make with one million invested differently. Okay, as games advance this disparity will not remain as huge (Wii games will go up to ~10 million USD) but the new market is still cheaper to serve and includes more people than the core market.
One final point about TFA is that I'm a little dubious on his definition of hardcore, in fact, I'm convinced some of his examples can't even be defined as one or the other - Rock Band appeals as much to hardcore gamers as it does casual gamers, you can't simply call it a casual game and hold it up as a pinnacle of success in the casual gaming world when I'd wager a bet, many of the people who bought it are in fact hardcore gamers who are also still buying the Call of Duty, Killzones and Halos of the world as well.
That's because the new market and core market customers are not two disjunct groups. Hell, I'm pretty sure plenty of "hardcore" gamers have bought Wii Sports and enjoyed it. However the big successes have appealed to everyone, not just one group and that appeal to everyone cannot be gained from making a "hardcore" game. A game with blood everywhere will alienate a significant chunk of the population, a game with a family-friendly setting (doesn't mean SatAM-style childishness) will only alienate a few people. A game with lengthy movie sequences and top of the line graphics will bore a lot of people massively while a g
The irony is that with the current way hardcore and casual are used shmups are indeed casual.
The problem is that hardcore titles simply can't make enough money to cover the increasing development costs.
Or maybe it has to do with there being no major Wii game releases in several months? Yes, there was Wii Music but that fell pretty flat (can't have a smash hit every single time) and didn't really sell systems. The release drought on the Wii simply prevented the Wii from increasing in appeal in that period of time and thus sales slowed down as the number of appealed-to-but-not-sold-to people ran low. This has nothing to do with "casual" gamers losing interest and everything to do with there simply being no games for them to be interested in.
If you want anecdotes here's mine: When the Wii drought kept going for too long I bought a 360 (it was fairly cheap, 200€ for the 60GB Pro, down from 240€) to expand the library I can buy titles from. Because I couldn't find anything interesting on the shelves I got some points for XBLA and my first game on this brand new HD gaming system was a port of a Playstation 1 game that I bought because I liked the sequels on the handhelds (CvSotN), now capable of displaying its 320x240 graphics in glorious HD. Maybe it's the way demos are set up on the system but only one of the six retail games I bought had a demo, most of the demos I played ended up repelling me from the game. By now I've really enjoyed two retail games on the system and liked three downloadable games quite a bit, I've still spent 30€ less on games than the console itself. Played the games I liked to the exhaustion point (either the ending or where they got boring) and now the thing's collecting metaphorical dust. It simply has a total lack of games, anything good is available on the PC as well and costs 20€ less there (with much faster pricedrops so even bigger savings if you wait for the bargain bin). I'm sure someone would be inclined to point at Gears of War now but guess what, they didn't even release that in this country (because reducing the violence would mean "compromising their artistic vision", whatever the vision behind a game about space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs is*...). Meanwhile my Wii kept accumulating games, both retail and downloadable despite being in a release drought (WiiWare wasn't in a drought and many older retail games kept falling into the bargain bins).
*=Speaking of space marines chainsawing alien dinosaurs, Dawn of War 2 got a 16 rating, Gears of War was apparetly too violent even for an 18 rating. Seriously, a freaking Warhammer 40k game passed as 16 without any censoring and they can't get Gears of War into a sane range?
The recommended use of Wii Fit is 30-60 minutes every day, the game actually complains when you miss a day. That's 3.5-7 hours per week plus whatever you spend on other games.
That's the mistake of equating a market segment and a playstyle. The "casual gamers" people talk about when they talk about markets are simply people who prefer games considered crap by the older gamers (who call themselves hardcore) and to reinforce their superiority the hardcore invents concepts like "these people only care for gaming for a few weeks then we will dominate again". The "casual gamer" isn't necessarily casual, that's just a stereotype built up by detractors who want to sweep this massive market under the rug to get more attention from the game industry and media. It's been argued that the "new" games aren't even new, they're just a new wrap on arcade-style gaming. Gaming "outgrew" the simple fun of the arcade and with that left a lot of the people behind who were just not interested in this whole "games are art" masturbation and would rather play something that starts with the fun right away and then challenges the player's ability.
I'd say the loss of time has already happened, people (well, veteran gamers) demand games where they can progress every time they play with not much learning required. Meanwhile "casual" games are all about applying your skill. A single match may only last a few minutes but to progress (beat your own highscore) you must improve yourself.
That's because the term "casual" is misleading. They only have a casual interest in the "gamer lifestyle" but they do focus a lot on a single game when they play one.
The death of hardcore gaming is happening because of the rising dev costs with stagnating sales. The core market is limited in size, it's not really growing much and as such the sales are limited. The focus on graphics among the HD consoles massively increases the development costs (factor 2.5) while very few additional sales are gained from the better graphics (and few sales are lost by having weaker graphics). Without casual gaming it wouldn't survive either because it's collapsing under its own weight, not anything else's.
The success of "casual" gaming merely comes from the massive numbers of people outside the core market who were previously unwilling to buy games. However, their demands aren't going to stay rock-bottom forever and producing highly profitable games with a cheap and crappy dev team in a few months won't work forever. While more complex games aimed at these people will have to look different from the ones that are being aimed at the hardcore they're by no means impossible. Applying the term "casual" however is wrong, these people can and will get very involved in a game they play, possibly moreso than "hardcore" gamers judging by the difficulty modern core games are dumbed down to. That should be considered, we're not talking about people who play a game for five minutes and then put it on a shelf, they've got attention spans much longer than the traditional gamers though they may have less time per game session.
Er, you realise that in order to download something, someone had to upload it, right?
Yes but the point is that the person who uploaded it is the copyright infringer, not the one who downloaded it (in part because the downloader can't know whether the uploader had a license for that material/the download contains infringing material though some countries have added laws that punish the downloader when it's reasonably obvious that the uploader didn't).
Also I don't think you get one count of infringement for ever copy you make, only for every work you make copies of.
The ones who are easy to track are the folks at TPB. Even if they didn't commit the crimes themselves, it would be hard to argue that they were not accomplices, facilitating those crimes, and doing so on purpose to make a lot of money. If you want to argue otherwise, you are either incredibly naive or are being intellectually dishonest.
I got my share of downmods for having that oppinion already, I'm not arguing that the TPB guys are in any way innocent. Geeks tend to focus on the tech approach but like the "make your cat accept the EULA" nonsense the law isn't easily tricked (and even if, I'm of the oppinion that it's completely within the rights of a judge to punish a tech-dodger as the law would have punished such a person anyway had it been written with the necessary tech knowledge/at a time when that tech existed and would prefer to see some anti-loophole laws, this applies in both directions though, the companies try to deny the customer rights granted by the law by using technical measures to circumvent legal protections and I'd like to see that made punishable).
Wasn't the rule that commas never go before "and"?
2) Also, are we now assuming that the masses are no longer responsible for their own actions? If I download a file or video from a site, and the material is copyrighted, does that mean that I'm not to blame anymore?
Unless you're in one of the countries that added special rules for it you weren't in first place. Copyright only applies to the distribution, not the receipt of copies. On P2P systems downloading often implies uploading but many defenses rested on the fact that only uploading is against the law and that could often not be proven.
Then again sentences are based a lot on the judge's gut feeling anyway, while the law may prescribe different ranges based on the facts it's still up to the judge to decide where to go inside that range.
To be fair if you actually want to render the... um... studs? on top of the bricks in 3d you'll have to push a shitload of polygons.
Yeah but Will Wright quit, do you trust EA not to do something like thi- Oh, crap!
Do I have to apply some filtering to this list to get your numbers or what?
The billions and trillions just handed out don't count towards this budget deficit and it's as large of a difference between unfunded spending and the economy as when we were fighting a world war in two hemispheres of the globe.
But now the US is fighting in THREE hemispheres of the globe!
That's pretty much a No True Scotsman argument.
Besides, artists need to eat too. Most would have to take up other jobs that take away from the time they have to create.
Because the creator may be completely overwhelmed by the whole work needed to actually distribute the work and all that and would rather take a lump sum, then get to work on the next thing? That way creators can focus on creating and people who know how to sell stuff can work on the selling instead of forcing one individual to learn all the aspects of every step involved and being completely distracted by all that so they don't do more of the thing they're good at.
From a macro economic point of view copyright is roughly equivalent to an arbitrary sales tax on specific items, with an efficiency rate of about 5% of the collected funds going towards the stated (as opposed to actual, of course) purpose of copyright.
Copyright is a wrapper to allow ideas to be traded like any physical good and thus apply capitalist mechanics to them (e.g. desirable works prosper, undesirable works fail). Like any product the workers that produce it get paid by the company, not by the buyers. The company makes money on the sales and uses that money to pay all the expenses any business incurrs. How much of the money that you spend on anything you buy in a store actually goes to the workers who create the physical object? Is it sufficient to merely create the physical object or is there maybe more work involved to actually getting that product into your possession? Like, say, letting you know it exists and maintaining the whole logistics chain to actually move it from the factory to a place where you can pick it up and pay for it? Maybe even that place itself?
The grunts in a copyright-producing company also get their salaries and they get them no matter how their product performs unless the whole department stops making money and gets axed. Yeah, musicians have a tendency to negotiate terrible contracts that pay terribly but they didn't have to sign those, it's perfectly possible to skip having a label and do all the promotion and distribution yourself (of course that's a lot of work but that's why so many sign up for the lazy option) or maybe negotiate a better contract (provided your offering is sufficiently superior to the offerings of your competitors that you can charge significantly more for it). There's no mechanism in place that makes it impossible to hold a copyright without signing up to a "no money for you" contract, you can hold a copyright easily. Of course it's not easy to utilize but I recall it saying "pursuit of happyness", not "happyness handed to them on a silver platter".
The large corporate machination that eats the money manages to survive for a reason: It does work the artists and creators don't. It also employs the artists and creators to create works they wouldn't want to create on their own accord but that the public at large desires.