Comment by advisedwang
4 years ago
What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do? Ask customers to sideload? Tell people to use f-droid? If they do that they're restricting themselves to a tiny fraction of the possible audience and thereby removing any chance they have of being profitable.
> What else is a mobile game dev supposed to do?
Start a startup to make a mobile app store that out-competes Google. Somebody is going to have to do it sooner or later. Young devs with nothing to lose are the best people to try.
Epic tried to get people to sideload Fortnite, and it was not successful. Epic is a billion dollar company. The right content is not the problem here.
> Start a startup [...] that out-competes Google
You know, I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
> I don't think that "just be better than the trillion dollar incumbent" is a reasonable starting point for any healthy market.
I'm not proposing this solution because I think it's easy. I'm proposing it because I think it's the only one that has any chance of actually fixing the problem long term. Government fiat won't fix it; it will make it worse, the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better.
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Is this a risk that you're willing to take? A handful of kids can (and frequently do) make awesome indy games. But how do you expect them to scale out a competitive software distribution platform, and who's going to pay for the marketing necessary to drive adoption among both developers and users?
> how do you expect them to scale
How quickly does it have to scale? Google itself was a niche product for quite some time before it had to scale.
I'm not proposing that someone try to displace Google all at once. Google took a long time to get to the position it's in now. It will take a long time for it to be displaced, if it is. But you have to start somewhere.
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