| > The interesting thing is that games are some of the most costly Hah! I wish. I've spent thousands on single SKUs - yet SASS and anything B2B can make that look like chump change. Meanwhile, Steam sales discount high quality, high end titles significantly pretty quickly - to the point where a lot of gamers basically never pay full price. To say nothing of mobile being flooded with $0.99 titles.
To say nothing of the effectively free humble bundles.
To say nothing of all the free web and indie games out there. Although I guess the right freemium Skinner box can also cost thousands in DLC and micro-transactions? But you can get games so cheap these days that people don't even get around to playing everything in their Steam libraries. > I just find it hard to rationalize FOSS zealotry that is almost universally hypocritical to some degree. On the more practical side of things, games are entertainment and frequently rely heavily on obfuscation to avoid hacking to gain unfair advantages in multiplayer. It's all somewhat fungible - if you can't play game X, you can still have fun playing game Y - the only real downside being your emotional investment in game X. Vendor lock-in isn't much of a problem, and a number of games are mod friendly. Having your business and personal data stuck in vendor lock-in and being legally prohibited from taking over where they fuck up, or try to escape from their clutches should they jack up their prices, etc. is a whole new level of potential downside. Entire businesses die when twitter changes their API terms. Meanwhile, if WoW ever shut down, gold farmers would find another MMO to abuse the same day. |
I was more thinking of zero day PC Games and especially console games in my comment but that should have been made clearer. I get that they do get heavily discounted though over time.
Totally agree with your penultimate paragraph, nobody likes it yet we still have our Netflix accounts AND our Amazon accounts.
To me it seems HN often picks on the little guys who are just trying to make a buck while actively supporting giant corporates and going Wheeee!
Nice post by the way