Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> Building a user base has to be done bottom up.

Stores have nothing to do with "user bases." You just want people to buy stuff. As a publisher, you have all the leverage when it comes to pricing arbitrage. You can sell game X on your platform for $45 and sell the same license to Discord for $50. The consumer doesn't care where they buy it from, as long as it's cheaper. Obviously, they're incentivized to buy it on your platform.

I'm not saying that platform size doesn't matter, but funneling resources for a win there would be a Pyrrhic victory. Steam won that battle a long time ago.

View on HN

Sort of. I agree with you that Origin, UPlay and the like have a huge advantage because they actually publish games.

But popular storefronts like Steam do have a clause that if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere.

Obviously a new storefront like Discord may not have that kind of power. But who knows.

> if you sell it on Steam you can't sell it for cheaper elsewhere

My understanding is the actual rule is a bit narrower than that. You can't sell _Steam keys_ cheaper elsehwere. If you sell it as a non-Steam game they don't have any input on it.

Yet this happens all the time. So I'm not sure if Steam has such a clause.

Wrong. Stores need traffic, which is why they locate on shopping streets, in large malls, offer large discounts at times and use loss leader products, and buy advertising.

Discords user base is traffic.

> Wrong. Stores need traffic...

That's incredibly reductive. Not all traffic is created equally. Reddit, for example, is notorious for providing awful bang for your ad buck[1].

> Discords user base is traffic.

Oh, I see, so Facebook and Google should've started online stores because of.. traffic? Of course not. If you build a (big enough) platform for free, one of the few viable ways to monetize is to do ads. Making a store is a very dubious prospect (which has not been received particularly warmly). If you're going to bring up Steam, keep in mind they had about a decade of first mover advantage.

[1] https://blog.ladder.io/reddit-ads/

This is just a bunch of random points added together. You have the confidence of someone fully ignorant of the subject matter.

The equation is relatively simple. Out of everyone that visits your online store, a small % will make a purchase. You can can both optimize quality and quantity of traffic. For traffic, you need to keep it coming every day, through out the year. Discord has that returning traffic/users. Game publishers do not.

I think you’re confused. Ubisoft, Epic, Bethesda, etc. all have launchers/storefronts that people need to use to play their games. Saying they don’t have “traffic” is nonsensical.

(But as I mentioned previously, and you brushed off, traffic alone is an awful metric anyway.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com