Ask HN: What online businesses do you find dumb but make a lot of money? |
Ask HN: What online businesses do you find dumb but make a lot of money? |
I'm one of those guilty of spending hundreds (or maybe low thousands? yeesh, I don't want to know) of dollars on Path of Exile cosmetics that have no gameplay impact. My justification (ok, self-rationalization) is that it supports a small company* making a really good free-to-play game that has no pay to win elements. As a gamer, I want more games like that, and cosmetics is a way for the whales who can afford it to subsidize free players, while still giving the game a large and thriving community.
That model is so much better than the typical Asian MMO (or Diablo Immortal) that are straight-up pay to win, gating progression behind various currencies that you have to spend real money on.
But yeah, at the end of the day, these are totally ephemeral things with no real value, disappearing into the ether when that game shuts down or the company goes away (which has happened with many of my favorite games, sadly, like Firefall).
*Side note: Path of Exile is actually mostly owned by the Chinese conglomerate Tencent. But development for the Western market still happens at Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand, and the monetization is still cosmetics-only in the West. I think Tencent made a separate version with pay to win for the Asian markets.
Same with a company that ranked high for "cancel $big_company subscription membership". You fill out a form, pay 10 Euro, and they will print a letter and mail it to $big_company on your behalf.
I used to think that people are dumb for paying for things that I show them how to do for free, but my dad is a mechanic and still lets someone else change his oil. People are busy and don’t like logistic friction.
I’m joining that industry myself with a 15€ Wohnsitzabmeldung. It’s worth it just for getting your Abmeldebescheinigung by email. I’m thinking of charging a little above cost for a nice layer over post-as-a-service and fax-as-a-service too.
Only in Germany!
I also love these German compound words that can turn entire English paragraphs into a single word. Do you have a word for when someone spends their entire life submitting to trivial government bureaucracies and then goes insane and breaks all the rules and rebels and moves into the woods and disappears from society forever without filing a single form?
If we support devs and writers and non-nude actors getting paid for their work, why shouldn't porn people also make a living?
In any case, I was at my local city town center this weekend and it was an absolute madhouse. It was like Black Friday of seasons past. I’m not sure where the money is coming from except credit card debt, and I guess people are saying “fuck it” to that? It sure would be cool if this ended up being a precursor to a nationwide debt strike.
The game kept getting better and better through the years. It's a pretty awesome success story.
They eventually made a board game too (it was okay, IMO).
Overall, I just prefer a gaming ecosystem made of many small but passionate players rather than the Ubi (or Wizards) of the world. And cosmetics can help with that without sacrificing gameplay integrity.