Makes sense as the barrier to entry gets lower and lower to make a game. Even I could make a game and release it. Of course nobody would buy it. One of the consequences of increased accessibility is that there’s more competition in the market place for those entering with the intention of trying to make money off of it.
Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.
YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).
Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.
The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!
I think the book part is solved through ebook portals. There’s a LOT of books on the Kindle store with shitty stories, grammar mistakes and AI cover pics (if not completely wwritten by AI nowadays)
What the all have in common is they’re digital products. There is a fixed overhead cost to host on a platform, but almost no cost per sale/visit/download, so you don’t need to worry about scaling production and distribution.
The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.
Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.
Makes sense as the barrier to entry gets lower and lower to make a game. Even I could make a game and release it. Of course nobody would buy it. One of the consequences of increased accessibility is that there’s more competition in the market place for those entering with the intention of trying to make money off of it.
Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.
YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).
Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.
The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!
I think the book part is solved through ebook portals. There’s a LOT of books on the Kindle store with shitty stories, grammar mistakes and AI cover pics (if not completely wwritten by AI nowadays)
What the all have in common is they’re digital products. There is a fixed overhead cost to host on a platform, but almost no cost per sale/visit/download, so you don’t need to worry about scaling production and distribution.
The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.
Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.