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Showing posts from November, 2018

Why Service monopolies are bad for your business, and how to avoid them.

It's like you spent your life savings building a house with rented bricks, and now the price of the bricks is going up. Unless you want to rebuild your house, you have no option but to pay the price demanded of you. Today the idea of games as a service is growing. But not everyone thinks that might be a good idea. Why is the service model so attractive to developers, retailers and publishers and why might it be bad news for you, as an indie developer or a player of video games? What is "Monopoly?" A monopoly is when there is only one seller of a commodity. That seller is able to manipulate prices since buyers have no alternative source of that commodity. A similar and related system (oligopoly) is when there are just a few sellers who work together to influence prices for their own benefit. Both systems have almost the same outcome as far as customers are concerned. Everyone knows the board game; In 1903, an American woman named Elizabeth Magie invented an educationa