Who’s The Sell-Out?

It’s an exciting time to be a lawyer. There have been times when I’ve wondered if perhaps I should have gone into game design instead of becoming a lawyer in the game technology industry, and if perhaps I’d sold out my life’s passion for merely peripheral involvement in it. This week, though, I’m actually relieved to be where I am. The people behind Buy Big are really copping it, and I could all too easily have been one of them.

See, I don’t think they set out to run a Ponzi scheme, at least not originally. I think they wanted to create the best augmented reality experience out there, and there’s no denying that that’s what they’ve done – part of it, anyway. There’s simply no denying that AR is flawless, and if they’d only used it to develop a virtual inspection app for the real estate market, they’d be cashing in right now in a major way.

Where did they go wrong? In my view, it was in thinking they were above such everyday goings-on as home inspections and property conveyancing. They wanted to create a game; I get that. But they tried to use this avenue to generate as much revenue as they would have by turning their technology into a property sales app, and that’s when they lost their way. The whole design was compromised by a need to make bucket loads of money.

I have this perspective because, during my law degree, I interned at a conveyancing firm. Malvern Executive Conveyancers was an upmarket operation with a small, close-knit team, and working there helped me see the appeal of working in the legal arena in the long term. It might not be as thrilling as designing games, but at least it was reliable and consistently in demand.

What does this mean? In short, it means I can work on design projects in my spare time without having to rely on them to get wealthy, and therefore I don’t have to compromise my creative vision by turning quality immersive entertainment into daylight robbery.