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Comment on It's 2023, so you should play Hypnospace Outlaw in ~games
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It's 2023, so you should play Hypnospace Outlaw
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Comment on Why Nintendo games never go down in price, according to Satoru Iwata in ~games
pyrex LinkI think it's a relief to see a games company that is prioritizing literally any long-term goal over revenue maximization.I think it's a relief to see a games company that is prioritizing literally any long-term goal over revenue maximization.
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Comment on Low stakes fantasy recommendation in ~books
pyrex LinkThis isn't the recommendation you asked for, but so you know -- the author of Legends and Lattes used to be a game developer, and you may enjoy poking through his previous work at some point.This isn't the recommendation you asked for, but so you know -- the author of Legends and Lattes used to be a game developer, and you may enjoy poking through his previous work at some point.
Hypnospace is a Geocities-style hosting platform for walled garden communities. Not only have they just finished a hiring spree -- they've bought some expensive TV ads, too. Now that they're running at a loss, they're entering a Revenue Extraction phase.
Most of the users are nerds -- a few punks and hackers, but mostly civilized gamers and sci-fi fans. The developers are all active users, except Adrian, a nonprogrammer who really only handles the business end of business.
There's a monetization model: an in-app currency, HypnoCoin, that can be purchased in real dollars. Still, the HypnoCoin economy doesn't seem profitable, and the main revenue source seems to be advertising via partner brands.
There's new spaces for teenagers and elderly people, but they're pretty rowdy. Not only do they need moderation, but the existing users don't seem to get along with the newcomers.
There's promise in those demographics: kids will buy everything you put in front of them, right? Maybe there's more promise in the new users than in the old ones.
In the real world, where Hypnospace is the subject of a video game by Jay Tholen, Mike Lasch, Xalavier Nelson and ThatWhichIs Media, we're seeing a run of platform implosions. It feels destined to happen because all tech companies are valued based on the idea that there's a nonzero chance they will make a billion dollars out of nowhere in the future, and if they don't make their monetization more aggressive over time, then that becomes impossible.
Most social platforms are in silent competition with other platforms: users who have connected already can balk at the paywall for whatever they're doing on your website and switch to a new website that is running at a loss doing the same thing you were doing a year ago.
How do you keep people on a platform? You lie to them a lot.
Does that feel good? No. But if you treat your users like cattle (or call them "whales") it feels less like you're hurting a person. You need to see them this way to do your job.
But modeling humans as livestock means excluding concepts like "user trust" from mind. When you imagine what your users are thinking, you no longer ask yourself what they're going to think of you after you do what you've decided to do. Frankly, you don't even want to think about what you think of you.
As a salesperson, seeing them this way may help with your moral conscience, but believing in it descriptively actually hurts your ability to do your job.
But as an executive, your job is something else: you still need a 1% chance of making a billion dollars. The real territory available to you is limited by structural factors: you can't build a house on a cloud, and you can't run a business without a product someone will buy.
The mental model of humans as livestock creates new territories in your mind where you can seek to do business. These territories, such as the Metaverse, are necessary for you to do your job. If you want funding, you must perceive them and you must take the business there.
Does that get you a viable product?
Well, I'm not sitting on a cloud, and I'm not writing this post from Horizon Worlds right now.
I'm recommending Hypnospace specifically because I think it captures the mindset I'm describing very well. It's doing a lot of stuff, but one of the things I like the most about it is that it's about people who have decided to drive the school bus off a cliff.