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Comment by gdeglin | Hacker News Reader

This model comes with a few problems:

1) High quality games that are meant to be completed quickly will make less money relative to poor quality games that stretch out gameplay.

2) Developers become incentivized to stretch out gameplay to increase revenue.

3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play games.

All that aside, this is an interesting idea. I could see episodic games particularly benefiting from this model -- so long as they don't fall into the trap of stretching out gameplay to increase revenue.

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Points (1) and (2) are true for ad-supported games in general. What Underground provides is a way for games developers to be able to provide a low-barrier ad-supported version of their game while being completely unconcerned with ads. It essentially allows the developer to engage in two different business models (pay-for-install and ad-supported) without that dual-model creeping into the implementation of the game. In that respect, this developer-player inter-mediation is more of a threat to Valve's Steam than it is for Google's Play store.

How are 1) and 2) different than the status quo? Aren't developers already incentivized to keep users in their app for as long as possible? More touch points -> more IAP buying opportunities -> more money.

> 3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play games.

As I understand it, it's not a pay-per-minute sort of deal. You'd pay the same price every month and the revenue would be divied out based on usage (like Netflix).

Point 1 and 2 seem like the same thing, but I agree.

That sounds like baseless FUD. Underground is essentially the TV model. While some TV shows do stretch out longer than they need to in order to milk the audience, there are plenty of high quality ones that don't, and many people who have less time watch those instead, or pay for premium, short-time experiences like movies. Which we all know are just as likely to be of low quality despite their reduced length. Meanwhile, people who just want something on all the time they are at home have plenty of decent content to fill their time with.

There are number of differences that mean Underground is not "essentially the TV model" when it comes to economic incentives. But, there are some similarities that can help us seem what some of the behaviours are going to be for content producers.

- Traditional TV has fixed length programming windows. No station is going to pay you more if you turn your 30 minute show into a 35 minute show. - However, you might get more money by turning your (25 minutes of content + 5 minutes of ads) show into a (22 minutes of content + 8 minutes of ads) show.

- And, setting up your show to end on a cliff-hanger and encourage viewers to come back next week is great for audience and therefore revenue. That's not "milking the audience" but it is structuring the system/content to maximise revenue.

- TV Content Producers are not generally paid "per minute" but according to its popularity with target demographics. That leads to trying to get more overall audience, rather than just more time. That will be true for underground as well, and it will certainly be the case that content producers will want as many users as possible to use their app as often as possible. But, the economics are such that for a lot of apps, getting existing users to consume for longer is a cheaper avenue than getting new users.

- That said, TV producers often try to spin-off new shows form old ones in order to get more airtime (& more dollars) for a brand. The TV industry graveyard is full of lessons like "Joanie loves Chachi". We similar stories in the app world, expect more of them.

The parent comment isn't FUD in any sense of the word.

Everything gdeglin said is true - just like in-app purchases have encouraged a whole genre of games where you pay to escape the grind, earn-per-minute games are likely to produce an equivalent genre of "just make that cut-scene run for 15 seconds longer" games.

Follow the money. If content producers are paid per minute consumed, then the owners of many of the game publishers will start making decisions that stretch the same amount of actual game play into a longer interaction.

I submitted my reply before being aware of the advertising model Amazon had for this.

It changes things slightly, but I think the issue remains. As you say, the problem certainly exists on television. Most shows do have lots of filler content in addition to frequent advertisements, and the ones that don't often require a more expensive subscription.

The high quality shows that don't stretch out the plot are the "must have" shows that drive cable subscription numbers and are somewhat disjoint from ad revenue.

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