I mean, I get it too (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 10:02 (1 hours, 23 minutes ago) @ Vortech
edited by Kermit, Tuesday, June 30, 2026, 10:17

I get it, too, but I don't have his priorities. Here's the thing: you provide a service. Your customers either think it's worth what you charge or not. Your job is to make it worth it to both you. You screw it up, you fail. In a free market, you're always going to have someone come along who will try to provide greater value. In my model, you don't need Cody Miller judging other people's priorities for things to change. There will be a disruptor who provides better value. Change will come.

But that's not what the invisible hand does.

It creates a minimum viable product which gains market share, and then diminishes the product over time now that it has the scale to manipulate markets and exclude competitors.

Are we talking about the same thing? “It" in your sentence describes a monopoly, which interferes with the invisible hand. The invisible hand refers to the process through which the public is provided with quality goods not as a result of planning, but because the public consistently chose the best value among competitors. That best value, by the way, may not be the minimum viable product.

That's what it does. Always. Decade after decade, country after country.

So all goods end up being produced by monopolies? How does that track with the state of gaming at this moment? How does that explain smaller studios producing AAA-level games that are hits?



To say anything else is ahistorical.

Hmm. Just the other day I drove my Saturn over to Sears to pick up some Kodachrome film to use on my vacation, which of course I'd planned using a travel agent. I'm visiting Italy, by the way, inspired by the movie ROMAN HOLIDAY--a friend had loaned me her copy of it on betamax last year. I dialed her up the other night to thank her again, but the line was busy. Yeah, the established producers stay established and nothing ever changes.

You can try to curb it by implementing regulation and laws like antitrust. But that's substituting human judgement for the "free market". Some great things have come out of the system, but those are almost always some iconoclast's personal vision that is financed by the seedier parts of the system. So, where does this human judgement come from; who gives ideas to the iconoclast? The critic.

The free market IS human judgment at scale—many humans making independent decisions.

P.S. The Critic, by the way, is also the "fountainhead of the public" will that will sometimes change what is considered a minimum viable product, so what exactly are you arguing against here, anyway?

I am not sure what "fountainhead of the public" means, but you seem to imply that only some people can be critics, as opposed to all consumers being critics all the time. I was arguing against the idea that we must align with Cody's ideas of what is acceptable in a game else it's our moral failure. It seems as if you are arguing that he is the Critic with a capital C--thereby the only one who can have ideas or legitimate judgments about what we should spend money on. I disagree.