Lifting All the Boats

Welcome to Rising Tide Games! You can probably tell that we are a game company, but that is actually the least important thing about us. This company was created to help make life better for as many people as we can. Better can mean different things to different people, but to us it is about working together with the people in our world and finding ways to lift each other up. That could be how people are treated at work, how much they share in our profits, or helping the environment more than hurting it. Right now our world is primarily the people working with us and the people who want to participate in our community, but as we grow so will our world. Ultimately we want to help everyone everywhere. The name Rising Tide was intentionally chosen because we want to be that tide that lifts all boats.

I think it’s also important to say that helping people also means not actively doing things that harm them. An example of this is advertising and personal data. You might notice that there are no ads on this site. There are also no trackers. All of our services are self hosted and the source code for the infrastructure is all open and available. The metrics collected are just about the site and not individual people. All of this is intentional. We will not do harm to the people in our world by collecting or selling information about them or presenting them with ads designed to manipulate their behavior through psychology.

So what would it look like if we grew enough to do everything we want? What if we were the size of EA or Activision? There is no limit to how much people’s lives can improve so I’ll just talk about a few things I’ve thought about. The first one is changing the rules of employment. I want other companies forced to match how we treat people or lose the best talent. I want people to be able to only work 3 or 4 days a week for 5 or 6 hours. There should not be crunch time. Employees should see significantly more of the profits that they generate. I want the executives in the company making within 5 times what the lowest paid employee earns. According to Payscale the average CEO makes 70 times the median employee before all of their extra compensation like stocks. If executives want to make $500k then the cleaning staff needs to make $100k. When times are bad, it is the leadership that should suffer first to spare harm to the rest of the employees.

Expanding out from employee benefits, I want us to help people in smaller regions of the country with less opportunity. We could do this by setting up studios in these areas which would hopefully start to attract other software companies once a base of people with software skills is established. Our goal would be to help those local economies with new high paying jobs and allow people to make games without having to live in a high cost of living area or city.

Employees are the closest people we can help, but I want to see us helping our community members, too. That means people who play the game, people who create mods or game content, and people who create content on sites like Twitch or YouTube. It’s not enough just to let people make whatever they can in our system though. We aren’t trying to create an ‘I got mine’ system. We could try to avoid this by giving people a percentage of what they sell, putting some other percentage in a group fund and distributing that back out to everyone that participated in a meaningful way. We would need to ensure it couldn’t be easily gamed, but the idea is that people who create great content do still get a lot of money from it, but at the same time everyone that is really trying and investing in the community has a bit of a safety net in case they fail. The more people there are making great content the more the tide lifts everyone.

I also see us and the community helping those who need it most. The sick, disabled, hungry, abused, poor, oppressed, and many others. There are easy things we will do like giving children’s hospitals as many free copies as they need for any kids that want our games, but we can do more. I’d like to build charity support into our games or site. Picture the highest rated players being able to schedule charity livestreams where people can donate to different charities. Similar to the great stuff done by Games Done Quick, but more often and by more people. Think of things like a charity bounty where people pledge an amount if a speedrun is completed under a given time. This is the kind of thinking I want to see directing us in each thing we do. How can we leverage what we’re doing to raise all of the boats?

There is still the rest of the world though. How can we raise all of the boats if we’re only doing things for employees, the community, and a list of charities? I think this is where the environment comes in. Anything we do to help improve the environment improves it for every person. We are already monitoring all of the power used by our server. We will offset this by buying solar credits because we want the world to be better off for having us. As we generate more money we can fund reforestation groups or green technologies. We could pay for solar panels for our employees to help them at the same time we help everyone.

We’re only starting and we have huge ambitions. If you want to help us feel free to join our forums or Discord channel and discuss what we’re doing.