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Selling Lemons

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Re: Selling Lemons

#101

Post by mattmaroon »

hylaride wrote: post #58
mattmaroon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now throw public festivals and it happens in meatspace too if you don’t actively prevent it. One minute that brand new themed festival is all vendors making cool clocks out of old vinyl, local glassblowers, local apiarists. Three years later there are 18 guys selling the same glass bongs from Temu. Curation is the answer.

I see the same thing from "handmade trinkets" in tourist areas when I travel. All drop-shipped crap that you see multiple times, especially if you go to multiple cities. Now I just find a fridge magnet and not care where it's made.

Funny enough I’ve actually just started ordering those on Amazon or AliExpress. What’s the difference if I get the Florida keys magnet actually in the Florida Keys or online if either way it’s coming to me from China?

(I mostly try to get something handmade or locally made if possible, in the rare instances, I buy trinkets, which is pretty much just that I buy a refrigerator magnet from every city I take my RV to. But every now and then yeah there was nothing but the Alibaba stuff.)

Re: Selling Lemons

#102

Post by a123b456c »

slg wrote: post #82
johnfn wrote: post #47

> I thought about this last week while shopping online for a sleep mask. Brands like MZOO, YFONG, WAOAW popped up, and these seemed less like companies and more like vowel smoke ejected from a factory flue hole, then slotted into a distribution platform I find this ironic. I swear by MZOO eye masks. They are so much better than anything you can buy in a pharmacy. They are vastly more comfortable, and they do a signif…

It isn't ironic, that is the whole point of a Market for Lemons, the inability to distinguish a good product from bad before purchase due to asymmetric information. That is why I think the author makes a mistake saying that it has no relation to enshittification. The ultimate problem here is that MZOO's incentive to maintain their level of quality isn't very strong. There is little preventing them from slowly make th…

Or it would take a strong base of reviews to establish a moat and the premium pricing that enables.

Re: Selling Lemons

#103

Post by vivzkestrel »

peteforde wrote: post #77

For what it's worth, the last sleep mask you'll ever buy is Nitehood. https://www.nitehood.com/

Non US guy here, first time in my life i am actually hearing this thing called a sleep mask. I used to wrap a towel around my face and sleep at night half my life lol

Re: Selling Lemons

#104

Post by somenameforme »

mwkaufma wrote: post #22
somenameforme wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviews are the filter. They can be gamed, and that's a real issue, but it's combatable. And in any case even if you get the market down to just 'thing with good reviews' and 'thing with good [fake] reviews' that's much more manageable. So for a developer perspective all you need to achieve is that critical mass of early positive reviews, and that's not especially difficult if you have something half decent.

Speaking as an independent gamedev: review-based storefronts (e.g. steam, egs, etc) select for the 1% of hits, but offers no pathway for the midrange -- everyone else gets lumped in with the slop.

It's definitely not just the 1%. Here [1] are some interesting data. 8.9% make $200k+, an additional 6.9% make $50k+. Exclude games under $10 and the median revenue of a game on Steam is around $17k. What's more relevant than that $$$ amount is the number of reviews that entails. That's sales in the thousands, which is more than sufficient to get that critical mass of reviews to start being recommended by their algorithm.

It also varies heavily by genre. People love making platformers and action type games, probably inspired by the extreme simplicity of some hyper-successful games. But those are some of the worst selling games and the saturation of the market there cannot be overstated. By contrast colony sims, 4x, city builders, and so on have median revenue (with no filtering of the chaff) in the $4k-$8k range. Filter out the chaff and it'd probably be in the $30k range.

And again in those numbers I'm not appealing to the $$$ values, but the corresponding number of reviews. Because the goal is to get some traction in their algorithm, and legitimate reviews play a major part there.

[1] - https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic

Re: Selling Lemons

#105

Post by rusk »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #93
rusk wrote: post #14

There’s definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market. So hard to get one that’s “nice” y’know what I mean. There are some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct. In the high street, it’s lemons all the way down. Even reputable brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple’s whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon. The only time they came close, inc…

I'm a bit unclear - are you talking about off-the-shelf prebuilds like the sort Dell or HP would sell? Or are you talking more gaming-oriented ones? Or are you talking just parts? If you get something more business-oriented, most of them are reasonable. They're not as good or as cheap as if you assembled it by hand, but they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk. They're often plenty powerfu…

> Dell or HP

HP: nicely designed lemons Dell: citrusy with a note of quality but you need to know which ones to get. Sometimes you need a few but they get there in the end

> gaming-oriented ones

Generally nicely powered but garishly designed and flimsy

> just parts

No. That should have been clear.

> they offer good discounts and benefits for businesses buying in bulk

Also outside the market. You need to know who to talk to.

Another brand that do good laptops are Lenovo but, they also have their lemon lines which you can end up buying from again if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Re: Selling Lemons

#106

Post by rusk »

righthand wrote: post #35
rusk wrote: post #14

There’s definitely always been vibes of this off the PC market. So hard to get one that’s “nice” y’know what I mean. There are some notable high end PC vendors but they typically sell direct. In the high street, it’s lemons all the way down. Even reputable brands have to get in on the action with a lemon line. Apple’s whole thing it seems, has always to stay away from being a lemon. The only time they came close, inc…

Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons: https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-... Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone…

> Brand capture is powerful but maybe only if you’re willing to eat the propaganda.

Correct. The brand stays solid. The keyboard, the ribbon, there were a few citrus aspects to that generation but they rolled it back in the next generation. Crucially, it only affected a small (but vocal!) niche market so the brand remained solid.

To be clear. I’m not making the case that Apple haven’t made mistakes or lemons, but that they have not entered the “lemon market” and continue to demand, and receive a premium for their goods.

Re: Selling Lemons

#107

Post by rusk »

bitwize wrote: post #49
righthand wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Apples never made lemons if you completely ignore all their failures. What instantly springs to mind is the keyboard saga. Those laptops were lemons. Here are some more product failures, arguably listed there are plenty of lemons: https://qz.com/apples-12-worst-product-failures-of-all-time-... Not listed but I would absolutely list the screen nub a usability failure and I consider my work laptop and work phone…

The first 2006 Intel MacBook Pros had a bad batch somewhere. I knew a bunch of guys who bought one as soon as they came out, and within a week every single one of those MBPs was in the shop. I bought a $900 Compaq Athlon64 laptop. It still works today and never needed repairs.

These are all examples of lemon devices. Not of a lemon market.

Re: Selling Lemons

#108

Post by lifestyleguru »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #98
lifestyleguru wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many countries where on attempt to small talk they will death stare and squash you into the ground, or laugh off. Actually... most of countries in Europe.

I've yet to find a place in the world where talking to strangers at bars is socially unacceptable. Everywhere has different rules about where idle chit-chat with strangers is allowed or not, but bars are a universal.

If the world is friendly to you then good for you, I guess.

Re: Selling Lemons

#109

Post by immibis »

ericmcer wrote: post #63
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

Not just The Internet. All of tech, and likely, other industries, as well. I was told that this was what happened to Etsy. When it first came out, people with real skills, sold real, handmade goods, at fairly high prices. Then, the mass-produced knockoffs flooded the site, priced way-lo. The legit stuff couldn't keep up; in price or in scale. I see this happening everywhere.

Isn't that just the nature of capitalism? When a need is identified people rush to fill it as cheaply as possible. It sucks that it drains the soul out of things, and that mass produced cheap variants can crush anyone trying to make quality things by hand. On the upside I can get shitty custom art (If I need a victorian painting of my dog or something) for like $20. That would have been hundreds a few years ago, and…

In other words, capitalism is a system where everything gets flooded with spam in exchange for cheap generation of AI slop (which is also spam).

I'm not sure this is a good system.

Re: Selling Lemons

#110

Post by somenameforme »

somenameforme wrote: post #104
mwkaufma wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an independent gamedev: review-based storefronts (e.g. steam, egs, etc) select for the 1% of hits, but offers no pathway for the midrange -- everyone else gets lumped in with the slop.

It's definitely not just the 1%. Here [1] are some interesting data. 8.9% make $200k+, an additional 6.9% make $50k+. Exclude games under $10 and the median revenue of a game on Steam is around $17k. What's more relevant than that $$$ amount is the number of reviews that entails. That's sales in the thousands, which is more than sufficient to get that critical mass of reviews to start being recommended by their algor…

One other addendum here. I didn't really put this into context of the exact numbers. So you might be thinking 'yeah, whatever - those top games are just the AAA stuff anyhow.' But those numbers are based on an average of 40 games being released per day. So in other words an average of 3.5 games are released per day that will make over $200k+!

That's kind of insane really, and I think basically puts to rest the claim that mid-range games aren't being reached. Because there's obviously nowhere remotely near 3.5 big titles, or even remotely well known titles for that matter, being released each day.

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