Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by johnnyanmac 84 days ago
15 years is a humongous gap. Almost an entire generation. Do you expect to make a Facebook killer in 2022? A WOW killer in 2017? Make a DOTA killer right now?

There's so many people who aren't even your market, they are an "one game player". You can't target that realistically unless that one game shits the bed.

2 comments

Tik Tok is arguably a Facebook killer.

Roblox is in some ways there, I think Epic thought fortnite could have competed. IMO they made a strategic mistake in shackling their game-as-a-platform to Fortnite. I thought the music fortnite thing looked interesting, but I have negative interest in installing Fortnite.

Call it something else and make it literally the first thing you see on epicgames.com, have it work on mobile, and maybe things would be different today.

(Aside: Roblox wins because I can go from typing in roblox.com into my browser and be playing a game with a friend in under 20s)

Instagram was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought it.

Snapchat was a Facebook killer until Facebook bought a VPN service and tracked every user without consent then stole half its features

I guess you could say LoL is a DOTA killer since its significantly more popular now, although some of that is likely to do with the Russian/Ukraine war

Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way and the best way and that isn't really a function of time. TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and Mumble got eaten up by Discord and also most game forums

One of the biggest issues with all these stores that are other than steam is that they suck in terms of UI/UX and they are HUGE resource hogs, I am more inclined to kill off the epic games launcher from running in the background because it taking up gigabytes of my system memory and that annoys me

Steams's UI is also meh and is also a resource hog. There's a good reason I don't keep any launcher running at startup.

>Giving actual compelling reasons to get users on your platform is the only way

And sometimes there is no compelling reason. People may only want 1 or 2 things and they bias towards what they are familiar with.i suspect that's why Twitter is still technically a market leader (despite falling apart behind the scenes).

I also think it's really funny that talk about offering a good platform then mention an example where the market leader just gobbles them up.