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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

is it better to keep pouring money into something that only 10,000 love? or is it better to use that money to create something that millions would love?

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Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain the old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).

Exactly. Besides, "pouring money into something millions would love" is an absurd statement.

1. Success is not guaranteed. At all

2. Things enjoyed by the masses don't need additional support to stay alive

> Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain the old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).

For games like Quake 3 it was quite open before it was old. The game was community mod'able during its prime. You had mods like OSP being "the" mod for competitive game play (1v1 DM, Team DM and CTF). It being fully open sourced later on was icing on the cake.

Wikipedia said it sold 319,970 copies for about $15 million[0]. It was a 1 time purchase game for like $50 at release. It took 1.5 years to make with a team of 9. Not a bad turn out for a single purchase and open game with a self hostable server component. Keep in mind that was 20 years ago when gaming was way less popular.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_Arena#Sales

Release the server code and let the 10,000 maintain it themselves.

Even that requires significant effort that companies are not willing to invest. They'd have to scrub the server of proprietary code, like integration with an account server, and update the client to work with the new system.

I'm not in the game industry, so I may be wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any push in the game industry to use open source for common problems.

Why should a matchmaking/game browser use proprietary code? Create standards and use off the shelf components for common problems. Whenever I go into the settings menu of a game I wonder how much time has been spent reinventing it.

Remember when we had mods and games like desert-combat (bf2 devs) and counter-strike got created.

I'd like to see DLC die tomorrow please and we get back to passionate people making maps and mods again.. maybe have a community where people build things, become game developers because they enjoyed the hobby.

Its something that has pained me greatly in the last couple of years.

I completely agree. Game devs have stripped so much away from the user. Matchmaking, lack of server hosting, no mods. It feels like much of the community has gone.

I play BF5 regularly and there's still a large number of 64 player servers full all day, every day. However, there's very few community servers and cheaters are so common. EA/Dice have abandoned it and there's no way for the community to keep it going.

Another game I used to play, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, is free to download [1] and still has plenty of community hosted servers/mods. That's a game coming up to its 20 year anniversary.

[1] https://www.splashdamage.com/games/wolfenstein-enemy-territo...

Should we only have 3 television channels so that we are all homogeneously talking about the same topics, or should we have 100 channels so that we all end up in echo chambers?

There are pros and cons to both. But is this a forced choice, or can we have both?

tv shows get cancelled all the time because there aren’t enough viewers to warrant subsequent seasons. it is better to spend that money on other shows that you bet will be enjoyed by many more people, otherwise you’re wasting the subscription people are paying.

For some shows I'd prefer an alternative funding scheme. I bet that some could be supported into further seasons by fan donations.

Is it better to build something that is beloved for a month or 10 years?

Is it more expensive to find a new customer or keep an existing one? Sure, for lots of these games, continuing support means pouring money into a product which has already been paid for, and that investment means little to the continuing payoff of that product. However I would argue at this point in VR's tenuous life, Meta is burning its existing customers (its early adopter evangelists) in the hope that new ones will materialize. But then again they've run the numbers and I haven't,

"I didn't set out to build a car that would be all things to everyone. I set out to build a car that would be everything to someone." - F. Porsche (who doesn't seem to have much trouble making money)

Answer: Let's do neither!

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