I’ve been thinking along the same lines, but regarding the games industry:

https://mobile.twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1412881397375...

I think the challenges in my industry are greater, but I think what you’re doing is part of a growing trend I call the “digital crowbar” model. Supercast is an example of one in your space that has already had some major success stories, though their latest poster child (Breaking Points) piggybacks still off YouTube. And of course Substack and Ghost are doing well with newsletters and blogs.

Curious what you think of my framing and how much it applies to your space or not.

Wow Lars you're on Hacker News, that's awesome.

As an Indie who started way way back in the flash portal era, I think the current situation with Steam and consoles is a vast improvement over what I experienced back then. Sure I had direct contact with players in theory, and no barriers to publishing my game. Except players had zero interest in me and my poorly made games.

Every indie looks at their conversion rate and goes "I would do so much better if my game got more attention" missing on the reality that attention is the gold of the modern age. Given enough attention anything can succeed, hey you can even sell attention to others by putting up ads.

Thus any platform which is both open, and gives attention (discoverability) is creating an unsolveable market issue. The attention is valuable, so giving it to anyone will just push the market into a market for cheapest converter of attention into dollars: porn. We see this already with Steam where the top lists always contain some sort of porn-lite games.

Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai.

> Thus my own take is: I don't want an open market. I want a market which heavily selects for quality. Then I want to develop and polish my game to meet that quality bar: since in such a situation I know my little train game will not need to compete with fake japanese hentai.

This actually makes the attention thing worse. Now you’re competing for the attention of a few people who are sitting under a deluge of games. Established players with an existing relationship get entrenched and you better find a way to build a relationship outside of the official channels if you have no name.

Plus some market wag will be along to tell you that the open market already heavily selects for quality. Which is fairly true and the issue for an individual developer isn’t really the result of the aggregate market.

The actual issue is that there is a very strong power law in terms of actual sales. Success begets larger success as the algorithms take notice, word of mouth hits scale and the developer can afford to reinvest with worthwhile advertising.

Secondary to that is that there is just too much information for players to make a fair assessment of all the games they could buy which further amplifies this issue with the market.

Basically discoverability sucks still

For the developers who would be automatically on a closed platform, yes less games would fix it but they’re probably already riding high in the curve. For developers who wouldn’t you want to be very sure you’ll definitely be one of the anointed. Be careful what you wish for.

I’d like to see instead the Steam open up a bit, curators exist but it’s hard to make that a job as it doesn’t pay. Tackling that and turning Steam into a collection of stores rather than a store might help flatten the curve by allowing niches room to breathe and paying curator businesses to mine for gems. The games press used to be this way but now outside of tiny outlets it’s all pretty homogenised and they all talk about exactly the same games.

It sounds like both of you guys are wildly off the mark.

Steam, the App Store, the Android stores, now Roblox... they have paid out like hundreds of billions to game developers over the years, more money per year directly to IP creators than any other category ever in all of history. So anything that starts out by characterizing them as the antagonist will fail to attract successful game developers, regardless of how much money you spend acquiring an audience or paying up front for content. See Exhibit A, Epic Games Store.

What is the problem with Roblox? The games suck. So many utterly garbage shitty clones. The shitty stupid mindless microtransactions in their shitty clones. There are no good Roblox titles. I don't care how many 8 year olds play the games, I don't care how much money in spent, they're all complete garbage. If you can't say that, that you and no one you know with a mature brain plays these shitty games, you are going to struggle to communicate with game developers.

What is the greatest threat to Roblox? Apple could start refunding parents on IAP. You're talking about such sophisticated stuff that doesn't matter. A successful Roblox developer tried to convince me the money came from $5/mo Robux subs and look, that's delusional. Even if you ask the developers they are delusional. The money is obviously from whales, because it's always from whales, and like, what does a 8 year old whale look like? An utter menace. Spending money mom and dad would love to get back.

What is the closest platform to achieving the goals you describe? Apple Arcade. It doesn't extract the full value from whales, so it will never be the #1 source of revenue for game developers, but the games are good!

Who is the real antagonist? Ketchapp (https://venturebeat.com/2014/03/30/threes-vs-2048-when-rip-o...). Riot Games. Epic Games. Most of Tencent really. Even Blizzard's last title which I love, Overwatch, is more Team Fortress than it is not.

There is one thing that rings true. It has been characterized as "it is way easier and more personally lucrative to be a money manager than to be someone the money manager invests in." Epic and Roblox are really tales about the power of capital, that they reinvented and cloned and pivoted their way into completely accidental success, being led by chickens with their heads cut off with fundamentally cloned and shitty IP, because they had huge amounts of money. The greatest ingredient of their success is owning the rights to the dice when they roll six, and rolling many, many dice.

I think you've completely misunderstood my position, or else I've failed to communicate some of my background assumptions. I thought I referenced the "chicken or the egg" problem and fruitless red ocean fights throughout the twitter thread, but perhaps I was too subtle. The entire point is to establish a new category rather than go up against them directly.

I'm very aware of this and it's not something I'm ignoring. It's the central thesis of "So You Want to Compete With Steam" [1] which is background for everything I think about. How to solve the Chicken or the Egg Problem is absolutely fundamental to these issues. Just because I don't have an immediate solution for it in a new space (other than spend truckloads of money) doesn't mean it's not something I'm thinking of constantly.

My answer to "here's how to compete with Roblox" and "here's how to compete with Steam" is literally the word "Don't" in big bold letters right at the beginning of both articles.

Also, I think you give Roblox short shrift. 99% of everything is garbage, that's just Sturgeon's law.

[1] https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...

oh hey, I've played the original defenders quest, thank you for making that.

I think this framing exactly applies to our space, down to the term "anti-platform".

Also I'd be deeply interested in how "Instant games" effects game-land, especially with WebGPU + faster internet on the horizon.

Aw thanks :) I promise to ship DQ2 before I die.

Happy to chat about instant games anytime, email me at [email protected] and in return you can tell me more about what you’re doing in video.

Specific questions for here on HN comments -

1) how do you feel you contrast with say, supercast?

2) Chicken or the egg problems are tough. What’s your plan for delivering a truckload of one or the other to break the deadlock? (In this case chickens = content creators, and eggs = viewers/subscribers)

> Happy to chat about instant games anytime, email me at [email protected] and in return you can tell me more about what you’re doing in video.

I'll absolutely take you up on this! :D Email coming soon!

> how do you feel you contrast with say, supercast?

I think we are using the trappings of supercast in order to advance the goal of an "open video platform". But the core goal is "open video platform", not necessarily to follow that exact playbook.

> Chicken or the egg problems are tough. What’s your plan for delivering a truckload of one or the other to break the deadlock? (In this case chickens = content creators, and eggs = viewers/subscribers)

Two things: - Shrink the eggs required to make an omelette. (forgive me for stretching this metaphor) If you make paid, subscription feeds; you need fewer individual people, and you can use existing platforms (Youtube / Twitch / Tiktok) as a marketing channel for your paid videos on the open platform where you control the business. - Piggyback on the existing channels that podcasts have in place (search rankings, recommendation rings).

If the balance is right, it'll work and we'll have an open video platform! And if not, then at least it's been fun to work on. Or maybe to put it another way, if it doesn't work, it will still have been the right thing to have done.

It would be nice if your service automatically handled submitting the RSS feeds to duck duck go.

Their video search has started including a wider range of sources; I imagine they’d welcome your content (especially since you’re likely to have a better privacy policy than YouTube).

This is cool, we'll look into this

Have you heard of twitch? Cause it sound a lot like twitch, and they already exist and have huge userbase.

This seems much more difficult to use than twitch and much fewer features too.

Have you interviewed both successful and unsuccessful YouTubers and asked them about their growth story? Questions like: What tactics worked and didn’t work for their own subscriber growth?

You could even ask them how they think they would recreate their growth story through your proposed platform.

What’s your content policy like? YouTube is famous for aggressively censoring views that don’t align with progressive sentiments, which makes sense since they’re a part of Google, who has the same cultural traits. People have been pressuring Substack to censor/ban content as well, which would probably cause subscribers to abandon them (I know I would). What is your policy?

This seems like the core issue.

Having a hard time imagining why you'd use StreamBus instead of Patreon + Youtube/Twitch etc... unless you are looking to evade the possibility of your content being censored/moderated/demonetized by the platform.

This is the narrative. But I haven't seen much censorship that wasn't well deserved.

Perhaps there are a lot of left wing hate speech personalities out there that are not getting taken down, but I have seen little empirical evidence that google really is targeting non-progressive views.

Would you expect evidence that isn’t anecdotal to be easily available to the public? It’s not like Google publishes a transparent public log of every act of moderation, so compiling evidence beyond a list of anecdotes is simply not possible. However, I would argue their publicly stated policies on disallowed content is enough to see the progressive bias.

To me and other moderates, and I imagine conservatives, the bias is clear. In this last year I’ve seen Google ban content relating to BLM riots, COVID (like the lab leak hypothesis), trans issues, firearms, and more. If you take an issue like whether transwomen should be allowed participation in women’s sports, enough content is taken down that what’s left as a result of Google’s censorship is a significant amplification of the views of dedicated trans activists relative to everyone else. Google doing this at their scale amounts to propaganda - after all, they are more influential than most governments given the large number of users they have.

Your definition of “well deserved” may fit your own worldview. But for me, I see a brazen suppression of free inquiry, and in many cases, the truth. These actions are framed as being positive, by defining censored content as “hateful” or “violent” or whatever, but they’re actually just damaging and dishonest, since they inhibit open discourse. It’s an important enough problem to me that I can’t support any new service that simply recreates the same oppressive mess - I just don’t see the point because whatever other features they might have, it will still feel mostly the same if this problem isn’t fixed.

I'm very doubtful as my own experience would lean strongly against it having worked at multiple similar companies (facebook, tiktok, snapchat) and having even worked on recommendation system area. Internally the typical employee tends to be liberal/libertarian and for facebook I remember conservative employees being so rare there was one person doing meetups with anyone interested to talk to an open conservative in the company. For tiktok I worked on the main team in the US about recommendation engine for videos and content like BLM was very supported and pretty frequently would appear as a hashtag in trending page.

I haven't worked at google specifically, but having heard plenty of people complain about tiktok/facebook recommendations with very incorrect guesses on what the system bias is, I'm doubtful google is biased against that type of content. Snapchat isn't known as much for recommendation so haven't heard much feedback on it's system.