[CharlesW]

Is there a law for "when a thing becomes easier and/or cheaper to do, more of that thing is created, and the mean quality of that thing goes down"? Of course, there are positive effects as well — desktop publishing was responsible for countless design crimes, but it also unlocked some real innovation during print's last stand.

[taylorlunt]

The mean quality goes down, but the total number of games above a certain threshold goes up, which makes discoverability a bigger problem than it used to be, but, assuming we can solve that problem, makes the gaming industry better.

[milesward]

Jevon’s Paradox

[tomaloner]

That's a super interesting take in that the normal assumption that "there's more games" is a supply-side statement.

But Jevon's would apply a step before that. The "demand" is really the people wanting to write games. When they do that, they then create "supply" in the video game market.

Per the parent comment however, Jevon's doesn't address the mean "quality" of games decreasing.

Similar things happened to published writing (prior to the Internet, published writing typically involved editors and professional writers) or Photography prior to digital cameras. That is - technology made something far easier to create so, it was indeed more commonly created and the mean quality (at least in the artistic sense) went down.

[toyg]

Part of the problem is that it's not necessarily quality going down, but the fact that quality itself is often defined by the amplitude of the shared experience. If thousands of people share the same art, then it's considered of great quality - even if it was just, say, a few white kids coopting some black music. When supply volume makes it fundamentally very hard to build such a shared experience, then it becomes difficult to recognise greatness in a (relatively) objective way.

It's the same for all art, as you say, starting from the figurative ones - the world has probably produced more professional painters in the last 150 years than in the whole history of the world, but among modern and contemporary works, almost nothing can really hold a candle to Michelangelo. Because there used to be one Sistine Chapel in the world, and now we're drowning in imagery every minute of our lives.

[BeFlatXIII]

This almost feels like some parallel of the Marxist claim that proper capitalist competition should asymptotically reduce margins per unit sold to zero but for creative industries.

[marcosdumay]

The other part has no relation to Jevon's paradox either. Stating that as creating a game becomes "cheaper" people do more of it is the basic behavior of the demand.

Jevon's paradox is about people spending even more on the thing than before the thing got cheaper. If you state "as creating a game started to take less time, people spent more time doing it", that would be a form of Jevon's paradox. But just that "as it started to take less time, people did it more" is not.

[jrc2022]

wikipedia : In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[gwern]

I would call it just "demand elasticity". Jevons paradox is a subset of demand elasticity where there happens to be some relatively fixed 'resource' like oil. There's no 'resource' equivalent for something like video gaming; it's just demand for writing games is elastic and when a game gets easier to build, people demand more supply, which comes into existence then.

[ghaff]

I actually think it's more like "supply elasticity." It gets easier/cheaper to create something and you get more of it--possibly at lower quality (as is generally the case here because there aren't any shortcuts to having good game mechanics).

Demand may or may not go up but, in any case, it's probably harder for the user to find the gems among all the clones and drek (and harder for the gems to gain attention).

[dllthomas]

... not J Evan's?