Comment by pdonis
4 years ago
> 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.
Or MAYBE the solution is to enforce antitrust and pro competitive market laws.
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Government fiat generally makes problems worse because the government is a monopoly and a monopoly has little incentive to do things well because of a lack of consequences for getting it wrong, unlike a business in a competitive market which has to respond to competitive pressure or go bust.
But a monopoly/cartel isn't a competitive market and has the exact same problem.
And antitrust is minimally damaging as long as you restrict the targets to companies that have more than, say, 25% market share. In other words, as long as it places no constraints on upstarts and challengers.
Because at that point, blindly causing harm to the large incumbents is actually good even if it's hamfisted and incompetent, because then the market can fix any damage by transitioning to smaller suppliers not subject to antitrust rules, which is the thing that actually solves the problem. The worst thing they can do is fail to do enough damage to the incumbents to restore competition, which is the same thing that happens if they do nothing.
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> the same way government fiat in general makes problems worse, not better.
To be clear, you're saying that U.S. antitrust legislation left us worse off, historically?
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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.
So, I take your non-answer to indicate that this risky career move isn't advice you're willing to follow. Am I wrong?