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https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec1...
Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.
I've said this for years. If there had just been a payment layer built into the web browser spec, we'd be in different world. A monetizable world. It's still not too late.
Or even more cheekily: if your job is one that can be done entirely on a tablet (rather than using a tablet as a supporting tool/appliance), it's probably not real work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not really into gaming, so I may have missed this, but I wasn't aware you could play games like Fallout 4 on an iPad. Yet games for handheld consoles like the 3DS and Vita, which are less powerful than modern phones (much less tablets!), sell for $30 and upwards. I have maybe a dozen 3DS games and shelled out over $200 for them. And that's somehow okay because they are Real Games™ (supposedly, I wasn't too impr…
Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.
Which has lead to the perverse situation we're in now where all the free games are engineered to be near unplayable without in app purchases. See Dungeon Keeper or Clash of Clans or a million clones.
Free web content that you can buy in other forms (ebook, paper book) or buy extras for (videos, email support, courses) seems like a pretty common model these days.
In the board and card game world, you've got games where you can download a PDF board or PDF cards but if you want a professionally produced version, you can buy it.
In software, you've got the paid support model.
There's plenty of actually valuable things you can sell for minimal additional effort on top of producing the content in the first place. And remember the bar for "actually valuable" is pretty low: SQLite sells licenses for public domain software after all.
This consolidation will happen to all industries where companies keep underselling their products. The weak ones will go down and eventually everyone else will raise the prices. Maybe it's not even a bad thing, just the way evolution works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.
Which is the ass-backwards financing problem the author was talking about: It would be much more reasonable for everyone involved to have a clear, up-front cost structure (even Bethesda DLCs are less scummy than the average Android app's in-purchases). Yet, consumers are not willing to do that.
When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.
Right now, we're communicating, sure. But a book like Eloquent Javascript (http://eloquentjavascript.net/) isn't content?
The postal system is a communication medium, but you can still buy mail (magazines, for example). I don't see why this is a problem.
I would love to have a thoughtful, Civ-like game on my phone. Its a Samsung Galaxy 5 with a 128gig micro-sd card. I know its powerful enough, but if its out there, I haven't found it. I, and many others, happily pay for such games on PC and gaming platforms, but on phones and Web, it seems oddly taboo. P.S. I'm not goving up my blockers on my computer browser. They aren't "ad" blockers; they're malware protection. To…
I tend to think the impoverished nature of phone games is related to the available controls. You see a lot of phone/tablet games that amount to "wait for something to become clickable, and then click on it". Maybe we need to provide an input method beyond "fat-finger your screen".
If that happens, though, the phone basically loses the portability that is its only advantage.