Not really. That's why I said no one can work a billion times smarter.
There is a "hack" to wealth, and PG has explained it here. You need a large addressable market with little competition where you can capture a small amount of value from a huge number of people at scale.
Individually, that value is often not worth much. A surgeon can save your life, and you'd give up most of your fortune for it. A starving person would do almost anything for food. Most startups don't create that kind of value for any one customer. They create a little bit of value for a lot of customers, and at scale that turns into enormous wealth.
That's what people are arguing when they say scale is a form of cheating. Maybe you got into the position to own it through harder work, smarter decisions, more risk taking, more grit, or more luck. But not a billion times more. Once you own it, you've locked yourself into a growth curve that scales with little additional work. In many cases, it gets easier as it grows.
Past a certain point, wealth is no longer tied to your work. It's tied to your ownership.
That's also why CEOs want equity. They don't want to be paid solely for their labor. They want ownership in large scale production so they can benefit from the growth of the system itself and eventually sell that ownership for far more than they could ever earn through wages alone.
This is why, as a software engineer, I favor equity compensation and have benefited from it myself. But I don't think I've worked harder than countless people in jobs that don't have this characteristic.
I wasn't paid more because I worked more. I was paid more because I owned something that scaled.
Ever wanted to build indie video games at a startup? Let's talk. Elsewhere is a San Francisco-based company building a new kind of multiplayer social video game, inspired by indie roguelike deckbuilding games like Slay the Spire and CCGs like Magic: The Gathering. We're using generative AI in a creatively interesting way to build the first AI game that doesn't suck. We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, and graduated from the first cohort of a16z's SPEEDRUN program, which is kind of like YC for games.
Ideally, you:
* Have worked as a software engineer before, ideally on a small team.
* Have built and shipped games before, either professionally or on your own time.
* Have experience with full-stack web development, using TypeScript, React, etc.
* Love games yourself, and have always wanted to work in the games industry.
Elsewhere | TypeScript Game Developer | San Francisco
Ever wanted to build indie video games at a startup? Let's talk.
Elsewhere is a San Francisco-based company building a new kind of multiplayer social video game, inspired by indie roguelike deckbuilding games like Slay the Spire and CCGs like Magic: The Gathering.
We're using generative AI in a creatively interesting way to build the first AI game that doesn't suck.
We're backed by top Silicon Valley investors, and graduated from the first cohort of a16z's SPEEDRUN program, which is kind of like YC for games.
Ideally, you:
* Have worked as a software engineer before, ideally on a small team.
* Have built and shipped games before, either professionally or on your own time.
* Have experience with full-stack web development, using TypeScript, React, etc.
* Love games yourself, and have always wanted to work in the games industry.
If you're interested, reach out to info@elsewhere.zone
Looks like this was cleverly designed to prevent costs blowing up. There's one game shared for everyone on the main page, and up to 100 private games per day.
It bases this entire chain of assumptions on "AI is really big and everyone agrees".
But I don't see the games industry as all that vulnerable to AI at all. Game engines already drive constantly-improving dev efficiency through improved abstractions.
As a YC founder turned gamedev, I can tell you that failure is the norm in both pursuits. As with YC, the question is: can we create more outsized outcomes when we succeed?
I don't think that's possible and frankly I'd much prefer capital not even try. To the best of my knowledge, the only games which generate the really outsized outcomes you'd need for a VC portfolio do really gross, anti-player shit (gacha, lootboxes, whale fishing, etc.) to get it. Or they become distribution monopolies like Valve, which is fine-ish when Valve is private but would be a ongoing catastrophe if it had been VC-funded. I'd rather not encourage that.
I agree. I'm not the moral police, but video games ultimately have to walk a line where they serve up entertainment that is engaging/addictive without being all-consuming and abusive, and do so for an amount of money for which there is general consensus is "reasonable".
Trying to ride that to the moon is a very different proposition from a B2B play where you sell some service that concretelt delivers $X/mo recurring value to each customer for a $Y/mo price tag, and X > Y, but Y - your costs still turns a healthy profit. If you do that right, everyone is winning and the economy as a whole grows, not at all the same as the zero-sum game that is soaking a few whales and ruining their lives.
I appreciate this perspective.. but I think there might be a false dichotomy here. Some of the biggest gaming success stories didn't rely on exploitative mechanics - Minecraft, Among Us, even Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in. The question is whether you can build sustainable platforms that create genuine value rather than just extracting it. Steam takes 30% but provides real distribution value. Maybe the trick is focusing on companies that help other developers succeed rather than trying to create the next Genshin Impact
> Fortnite's initial success was based on solid gameplay before the monetization kicked in.
Fortnite is a bit of weird backwards example because the early PvE iteration had paid lootboxes, but they were scrapped in the Battle Royale spinoff which actually got popular, and eventually removed altogether. They still do things like engineering FOMO to drive sales but ironically the games monetization was the most exploitative when nobody was playing it.
Agreed. It is possible to make money in video games while treating customers with respect. This is the way! (and what EGG looks for because it builds stronger IP and longterm retention and good will)
I helped Indie Fund Hollow Knight back in the day and look a them now!
I think it is possible to be successful in games without being predatory. Humble Bundle was a demonstration of that.
I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable. They usually yield a “ring of fire” effect that creates a growing ring of users for a while but really you’re burning out all your core users and will implode. This is how many describe the original Zynga model.
Supercell (founded around the same time) has cultivated longterm ecosystems and IP by respecting their players.
>I don’t believe that ultra-predatory mechanics are long-term sustainable
I don't think they're trying to be. I think they're whale hunting, find a few high spenders, and milk them for all they're worth. Then they spin up a new IP (or license one out), rinse and repeat
Yes they are. The implementation tends to differ from how eastern-developed gacha games work, but they're making billions from virtual slot machines nonetheless.
Yeah, I still indulge in video games, and understand that on the surface CSGO skins feel different than Genshin summons, but from 100 feet up it's all the same crap, imo
I do kinda get what you mean, though. Gacha mechanics feel expected in anything western, while 'loot boxes' are still a 'feature' of some games in the east. Eastern studios have definitely noticed, though, and are running the same playbook.
I see. You can remove 'Overwatch' from my original comment and the point still stands, but I do appreciate the fact check. I know Blizzard from HearthStone and Diablo....not great experiences with gacha there haha (Diablo Immortal, atleast), but those are far from the most popular Eastern games
You're right though. Industrial software/hardware in general always has money in all times. But gaming is essentially entertainment and people only spend on entertainment last. So gaming industry has a lot of failure but even if you're successful in a huge way, you won't earn huge money. There's a big cap there.
2nd employee at Semantics3 here. Considering all the AI available today I think things like product disambiguation becomes wayyy easier. We were trying many tricks and heuristics to identify the same products across sites.
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