Comment by gamblor956
2 months ago
Digital goods do have a marginal cost. It's a lot lower than with physical goods, but there is a cost: at the very minimum, a digital good takes up storage space. A streamed digital good requires bandwidth and electricity (and in most of the world, both are metered resources).
Also, most consumers don't choose on quality; they choose on price. This is why free mobile games became huge and paid mobile games are a dying breed. In the physical world, it's why shein and alibaba nearly became trillion-dollar companies.
Sure there is some minimal marginal cost, but it's so close to zero that it's usually negligible, and the incentive is to basically give it away and "monetize" something else. Your point about games actually just makes my original point. Software is already usually free or dirt cheap, which is why reducing the cost to make the software can't create some "low cost / low value" quadrant. Unless your talking about bespoke software that has such a small market size it isn't worth making today. I could maybe see that area opening up, but even that software would not fit the OP's description of software that "has no owner and is not meant to be maintained"
I feel like we can round down fractions of a cent to zero. In practice, it's basically zero.
And, I think, consumers would like to balance both cost and quality. The problem is cost is obvious, quality is purposefully obfuscated. You really can't tell what is or is not quality software without spending an unreasonable amount of time and requiring an unreasonable amount of knowledge. Same with most modern physical goods.
> storage space...
You don't need to explain this. Literally everyone here knows what you said, and everyone - including you - knew that he also knew that.
This is pointless and annoying nitpicking.