Not to discount the hardware, which looks absolutely beautiful, but what strikes me the most is the business model. A new game, every Monday, delivered wirelessly to your pocket. What excites me about Playdate is that it is something only an outsider with no attachments to existing business relationships could make. Games released today are still encumbered by the regional and geographic thinking of traditional softw…
I'm actually really dreading the Apple Arcade business model. The game developers are compensated by time spent in their game. This means that, similar to the current craze for open world games, shorter, more experimental games will simply earn less. Thus, meaningful content will be stretched even thinner to fill up more of the user's time. It's another nail in the coffin of single player narrative experiences. Strea…
I really think it harms the world by incentivizing creators to pad and fluff. Dickens is great, but you can really tell which of his works were published serially, because it affected how he wrote.
At the same time, paying a flat amount for each created work incentivizes creators to pump out a huge pile of small works. It's all singles and no albums, which I also think is bad.
The programmer part of my brain wonders if you could solve this by simply picking a function somewhere between O(n) (pay linearly by quantity consumed) and O(1) (pay a fixed price for the whole thing). The obvious middle point is O(log(n)).
I wonder how well it would work if creators were paid by time spent consuming but with a function that offerred diminishing returns the larger the quantity was?
