Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

And so many exceptions to that.

One example?

Stardew Valley. Runs on everything, not just "viable" OSs, made by a single person, and easily competes with an entire genre of gaming to pay the author.



The upper bound of building a business on top of Stardew Valley appears to be https://www.patreon.com/pathoschild which makes under $400 per month after Patreon's cut. That's not enough to work as a single person full time let alone hiring a team.


Um... No? [0]

A $400/mo Patreon does not exactly outweigh somewhere between 18-35 million sales on a single one of the platforms it supports. I would not call that the "upper bound".

[0] https://steamdb.info/app/413150/charts/


That 18-35 million goes to the game's developer and probably not even a single penny goes to those building a business off of designing content on top of the game. That figure is irrelevant.

Taking Fortnite as an example the relevant figure would be that creators on Fortnite can make over $10 million per year. Bringing up that Epic made a few billion dollars is irrelevant to what this conversation is about, which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.


> which is games where it is financially viable to build content for them.

If that was your interpretation, then it would have been better to have mentioned it anywhere upthread. What we have, so far, is people talking about the gaming industry, and you calling it a monopoly. Nowhere before do we have a mention of third-party developers.


I got tripped up because the parent comment used the term "Fortnite store" when I think they meant "Epic Games Store", so I didn't mention the monopolization that I was talking about was in game monetization upon an existing game.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: