• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    22 hours ago

    And that’s probably why people get so disappointed w/ tech companies.

    It’s not that the prices they switch to are unreasonable, but that they hike prices after getting a user base, so it feels like a bait and switch instead of an early bird discount. If they made it an actual early bird discount, people would probably be fine with it.

    Or maybe they keep prices the same, but drop content while keeping prices the same. If they instead structured it as a base tier and an “early bird” free access to a higher tier, which then starts costing money after some time period, I also think people would be okay with it. I have always thought Netflix should have packages, so you could opt-in to additional stuff like maybe Disney or HBO content. If Netflix did this early on, maybe Disney and HBO wouldn’t have bothered making their own streaming platforms and instead just raked in revenue from these higher tier customers, because they get most of the benefit of having their own streaming platform, with none of the costs.

    In pretty much every case, I’ll point to Valve’s business model as an example. Gaming companies generally don’t feel the need to run their own platforms, and the ones that do often still distribute through other stores.

    • PuddleOfKittens@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      Valve was the first, their business model was basically removing retail (the actual reason for Steam was to make updates trivial, so a Counterstrike update didn’t break half the servers for 2 weeks), for everyone after Steam the business model was removing Steam by replacing it with a Steam clone.