{"id":104,"date":"2011-09-19T22:52:20","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T02:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/?p=104"},"modified":"2011-10-01T23:55:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-02T03:55:50","slug":"the-numbers-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/2011\/09\/19\/the-numbers-game\/","title":{"rendered":"The Numbers Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

I often read AltDevBlogADay<\/a> and love the amount of great articles that are posted there!\u00a0 Today Kristen Bornemann made a good post on the topic of game cloning<\/a>.\u00a0 She touched on a point that I find will be very important for the future and I think the cause of it is all because of the numbers game that we as humans are playing.\u00a0 So I felt the need to gather a couple of thoughts and give an explanation of why I think it’s going to become more and\u00a0 more of a reality, and that there’s really no point in fighting it, but instead try to be ahead of the curve and provide more than what others can.\u00a0 Here was my response:
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I think this ‘problem’ as many consider it, will continue to get worse and will eventually become the norm.\u00a0 The cause is a pure numbers game and helped by efficiencies throughout production.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let me explain more.<\/em>
\nTo begin with you have a convoy of settlers and only one person knows how to plant and grow apples. Everyone likes apples and want the product. That person has a skill that no one else has, and is able to monetize\/trade from it.\u00a0 Until someone else gains that skill, and notices that they too can make the same product and profit. They’ll probably make something a little different in order to differentiate their product.\u00a0 Since there’s not many competitors yet in this harvesting game someone quickly figures out how to differentiate more and harvests oranges.\u00a0 Since everyone knows you can’t compare apples and oranges it’s considered a new product.\u00a0 All is good.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fast forward lifetimes.\u00a0 There’s now tons of people all trying to market their apples and oranges, etc. and competing for customers and lowering their prices.\u00a0 There’s been a bunch of new harvesting technologies as well that has helped make it super easy to harvest all kinds of fruits.\u00a0 These efficiencies have made it so easy in fact that now more people are doing it as a pastime even.\u00a0 They’re not looking to make money off it either, so they’re willing to practically give away the ‘fruits of their labour’ if you will, for free!\u00a0 Teleporters exist of course too, making it super easy to market goods to anyone around their world in an instant, and removing any sort of ‘shipping’ costs.<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s now tons of people all trying to harvest fruit and market it.\u00a0 How many possible variations can there be?\u00a0 Location may have been a deciding factor before, but now thanks to the efficiencies in transporting these goods apples on one side of the world are in the same market as the ones on the other side of the world.\u00a0 So you’re bound to start seeing the same product.<\/em><\/p>\n

When you have so many people all doing the same thing with very little cost to themselves, it’s like a brute force method of finding every type of fruit out there.\u00a0 Welcome to crowd-sourcing …err crowd-harvesting.<\/em><\/p>\n

So what to do about it? Don’t fight it cause you’re fighting numbers. Numbers almost always win. Instead you adapt. Figure out what ‘variables’ are in the whole process (from creation to marketing), which ones you were relying on before, why they’re gone now, and then which ones are still there that you can make your competency and do better than others.<\/em><\/p>\n

You’re right about one thing, being first to market with a new variation can help. That’s your timing variable. Does that affect your quality variable though.\u00a0 Marketing to the right audience and just getting eyeballs on your product is a big one.\u00a0 That’s often the one that pulls in the customers for iOS.\u00a0 But I think there’s more than just the marketing or timing.\u00a0 I think that quality variable is huge! As well as providing some sort of value to the customer. <\/em>
\nBut the only way you’re going to be able to combat the clones is to make your product unique enough that it’s hard for others to reproduce.\u00a0 That’s why Walmart is where they are. JIT shipping is huge, and it’s not easy to reproduce.\u00a0 Learning your trade better than others, and figuring out how to exploit one of those variables means you can make better and faster art than the next guy, or you can make some killer particle effects code that’s #1, or you can manage 10x more projects at the same time, and you can do it fast enough that the cloners are always a couple steps behind.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As they say, times they-are-a-changin’. The world in general is seeing many things become relatively cheap or easy to do thanks to technological advances.\u00a0 And with the massive population that we have, there are tons of ideas out there, so you’re bound to find someone working on the same idea as you.\u00a0 This is extremely important for the patent debate, but I’ll leave that for another day.\u00a0 Not sure what the next ‘right’ move is, but who knows maybe we should be finding these others and collaborating instead? Could we possibly make a better game together?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I often read AltDevBlogADay and love the amount of great articles that are posted there!\u00a0 Today Kristen Bornemann made a good post on the topic of game cloning.\u00a0 She touched on a point that I find will be very important for the future and I think the cause of it is all because of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/GetOffMyLawnEntertainment.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}