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by adithyareddy 26 days ago
If you're a grocery chain you know exactly how much an item costs and exactly how much you sell it for. You also simply order more or less stock of the item depending on how it's selling.

If you're a video game company, you invest millions of dollars in a project up front, for years, and you don't know until after release whether you:

- Make back all the money you spent plus a healthy profit on top.

- Just break even, but you lost the opportunity cost of all the other things that money could have been spent on with better utility.

- Your game flops and you wasted all the money you spent developing it.

It's also highly uneven. Extremely likely that King (Candy Crush) and Mojang (Minecraft) are making a ton of money, and everything else is a money pit where you pour in millions of dollars and you don't even make your money back.

1 comments

Food prices can change significantly depending on natural disasters, diseases, supply chain issues. There's more uncertainty than you acknowledge.
People have to eat. They dont need to play games, especially bad games.

Or they play some indie game like Among Us and not some big studio expensive game.

The stores themselves aren't losing money if there's a natural disaster.. the farm does, the distributor likely does.. but not the store. The store just raises prices against future inventory pricing, often ahead of the inventory itself.