4 ms·
Speaking of emotional-jerks, I cannot help but get extremely upset every time I hear how "innovative" angry birds is compared to crush the castle. Replacing a b
by tensor 14y ago
Speaking of emotional-jerks, I cannot help but get extremely upset every time I hear how "innovative" angry birds is compared to crush the castle. Replacing a ball with a bird and shortening the launch mechanics do not to me represent the difference between millions of dollars and thousands of dollars.
It drives me crazy that our society allocates millions of dollars of resources in terms of profits for something like this. This is not genius. This is not innovation. It's polish and refinement on an ultimately inconsequential entertainment product. I understand completely why it makes money. But I still cannot help but be upset that things like this do earn obscene amounts of income.
Unfortunately, the markets reward only what people buy, not innovation, not what might change society permanently, nor good intentions. Sometimes it just rewards replacing art assets with birds and pigs.
- geoffpado 14y agoPolish and execution are everything. It's the reason Apple's MacBooks sell for much higher prices (and much higher profit margins) than similarly-specced (but lower build quality) PC laptops. It's the reason people are on waiting lists to buy Nest thermostats when the same people didn't give a second thought to thermostats before. Rovio took a fun idea and made it much more accessible and marketable to people. That's not an easy job, and the market rewarded them appropriately.
- tensor 14y agoThe engineering that goes into macbooks or nest is not comparable to the angry birds art assets or their launching tweak. That also ignores the fact that the former are physical products that also require an entire ongoing, expensive and complex manufacturing process. The casual game market, at this point, is more about luck than anything else. These companies produce game after game, many with an equal amount of polish to angry birds, hoping that one lottery winning recipe. Draw Something is another good example, minus the polish. Zynga's entire company is based on this understanding. Their strategy is to wait until they observe a success by another developer, then produce their own more polished version of that product. Thus they get all of the profit and none of the risk or cost of experimentation. The market is not "rewarding" anything. It doesn't have ethics, it doesn't recognize innovation, it doesn't recognize hard work nor difficulty of implementation. The allocation of profits in the casual games market is as fickle, nonsensical, and random as musical pop stars. The music industry has learned how to "manufacture" pop stars and the casual games industry is now starting learn to do the same in their market. I also feel that pop stars have unwarranted sums of money allocated to them. Obviously I am in the minority in this feeling however, and that is ok.
- tokenizer 14y agoYou may be in the minority but you're not alone!
- ebrenes 14y agoI think you sum it up perfectly in your third paragraph. The emotional jerks we get in these examples are based on that false assumption that the market "rewards" anything. The market just is, and it's a fickle beast as you eloquently describe. The difference between angry birds and crush the castle may very well be just the artistic assets, but those differences matter immensely to the market. And today's markets seem to reward a few projects much more heavily than others once they've reached a critical point.