Was catching up on his blog and he's posted some good stuff recently. I've been meaning to post a GDC talk he did earlier in the year but these are more on games as business.

So first there was this on business cycles in gaming which I found insightful. I've previously thought a lot of the ideological / narrative focus from specific constituencies in gaming (media, indies - to generalize too broadly) is largely due to economic motives, and attempting at identifying a loyal following to support survival. This blog post really put it's finger on it and helps me explain that impression better. PS: Note I am not for or against this as a strategy.

And pretty much next he deepdives a bit into aspects of the different business models brought on by gaming platforms. Likewise insightful, and one of the links (he says "try this excellent article") is really good on how it looks at different media and compares across. Raph is very insightful, for example "A lot of devs do not want to move to free to play models. They see it as a far greater threat to ethical and creative game design than most anything else." This is spot on I think, and reinforces the dynamic from above.

Anyway, without going into animosity - because economics, ethics do not need to get personally charged IMO - anyone care to discuss on these?

PS: I also really like this one on games vs sports from a formalist and cultural perspective... just more adhoc, whereas the previous two share some zeitgeist, let's say.

Business life cycles are a thing and now I think we're at some crossroads. With SteamSpy, it's now interesting to see the trends (to take with a pinch of salt of course):
https://medium.com/@galyonkin/some-things-you-should-know-about-steam-5eaffcf33218

http://steamspy.com/genre/Free
I'm a bit amused to see how F2P are extremely popular on Steam even for the most obscure ones (go to the last page of the listing). It's particularly interesting as their owners numbers can be bigger than demo downloads of regular games (look for my "Lemma" post a few days ago). Honestly, if you can think of some way to monetize your game on Steam, it's a better way than relying on premium pricing (and you also can circumvent the refund system).

From a business POV, I think mid-sized studios (from 4 to 30 employees/contractors for example) will mostly go down as soon as they appear in 1-2 years time as market is saturated and prices go down. The effect on games would be somehow interesting as most of productions could be divided between very small prods (done by 3 people max), "well oiled" games from business-savvy studios (Rovio, WB, etc...) and a few outliers from the mid-size studios. Anyway, in 1-2 years, the current cycle will be more clear and defined as we can only speculate right now ^o^

Meh. There's nothing there new or even especially cleverly written. Maybe, just maybe, if you're new to seeing the business side, then this will be valuable to you by describing one (flawed) way that technology cycles. That second one feeds back directly into the first, which is presumably an intentional reinforcement of his thesis from the first.

There's nothing bad I can see about his articles except his initial and overly specific assumptions, which won't generalize well outside of this particular cycle (ironically). But I'm not a software developer; maybe I'd have to be in order to get worked up about this. I just see him writing about basic, 100-level economics and business management stuff, and I've sen all that, much better defined, in actual 100-level economic and business management courses >.>

I am always glad to see people who write long-form well, though. As news (and thus blogs and other derivatives) becomes increasingly "seven word, one sentence paragraph leading into two-sentence paragraph then double break for a single. Goddamn. Word." (I blame Twitter, not because I have good reasons, but because I like to blame Twitter for things) it's a little less common to get something worth reading, whether I agree with it or not, care about it or not. So good on him for that.

Come on dude those type of articles are so 2010 ^o^
Now you must break your articles in several pages with only one paragraph per page/click ;)

On one hand, and you also put your finger on this, I, like I'm sure several others has felt an attraction to games development. A lot of "us" (and more and more we see actual professional devs here in GOG), go into the business with a very idealistic and even naive view. Anything that can gently open someone's eyes to the realities of the market is IMO a godsend. Jeff Vogel is another guy that has written, albeit in a more humorous and even alarmist fashion, about similar dynamics.

On the other hand, Raph is that always rare mixture of good at reading data, and good at reading people. The culture wars in gaming got surprisingly hot, surprisingly fast, IMO. I expected them to arrive through the DRM and service models side (the kind of trends that are not new, but he describes with skill) instead they arrived through a much more ideological angle. Some of my, let's call them suppositions, on motivations of the parties involved are made clear between the lines in these articles. Maybe that's confirmation bias, maybe it's true, and maybe it's both. ;)

Still, if someone actually disagrees with the views and examples offered in the links, that's what I'd like to read the most. Challenges to my confirmation bias are always welcome, thanks. In which current, maybe you could expand just a little more on what you meant that his assumption won't generalize well out of this particular cycle? I'd like that I think.

Meh. Typical Koster, master of saying a lot without saying anything.