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A comment on What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project. Parent comment

Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by hibikir on Sunday August 02, 2020 @12:30PM (#24029638)
I am not sure about that. There's this small company called Stripe whose entire business model is about making it easier to make your online store: They don't do anything you couldn't do yourself, but it sure mes it a lot easier. Similarly, in videogames, Epic makes quite a bit of money licensing engines, which, in practice, is all about helping other people build faster. We all built websites and ran companies before AWS, and yet they are also they might be Amazon's best division.

What is difficult in those kinds of businesses is to identify whether there's a real market there, and to convince enough people to try your product. For a new kind of product, you have to easily show large amounts of value, because people are used to get things done without your product.

So I'd not say that it's a waste of time, but it's just a difficult kind of business to enter.

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Re:What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game De... by esrauch on Sunday August 02, 2020 @12:38PM (#24029699)
I'm not sure if this is what the parent comment meant, but it seems reasonable that it's not a lucrative path to focus on anyone who doesn't already have a functional business without you. Partnering with that existing coffeeshop can pay off a lot more easily than the dozens of weekend game devs that will probably never make a cent themselves.
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