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The article makes an analogy with shoes but in order for it to hold developers would have to be making identical games. Many people wait for the next release i

The article makes an analogy with shoes but in order for it to hold developers would have to be making identical games. Many people wait for the next release in a series and many people buy on release day. If you just want to kill a couple hours then sure, any game might be good enough for you as the consumer. But if you want to play Action Game 9: The Bad Guys Lose then that's your only option. The authors big mistake is in equating a commodity good like shoes with a creative good like games. If you want to read the latest Game of Thrones, you aren't going to say, "That's 30 bucks! I'll just buy Harry Potter."

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The article makes an analogy with shoes but in order for it to hold developers would have to be making identical games. Shoes aren't identical. Competing shoes may be closer substitutes for each other than competing games (or, maybe not for popular cookie-cutter genres of games.)
vidarh 13y ago
> If you want to read the latest Game of Thrones, you aren't going to say, "That's 30 bucks! I'll just buy Harry Potter." But if you want both of them, you might end up picking the one that goes on sale first. There are some books I buy no matter what, but I also have a list of "books to read someday" that is so long, and growing, that I'll likely never reach the end of it. And a large number of those books are fairly interchangeable in my mind, and so it comes down to which offers are shoved in my face at the right moments.