Comment by SL61 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SL61 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Gamers today are not price-averse like they might have been when the gaming demographic was mostly teens.

After a peek at your website, I see I'm quite a bit younger than you. I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro. In some servers I've even seen young teens (13-14) spending their allowance money on it. It would be interesting, based on your anecdote, if most Nitro subscribers are young users. It might be due to the custom emotes, which are probably more desirable to younger users than older ones.

On top of that, Discord has become the main social media platform for some people. I can't imagine using it that way myself, but I know a lot of people who are in a massive number of servers and spend much of their day on it. It's not just gaming voice chat for them, it's an entire social network. These people, who also tend to be quite young, almost always have Nitro, because it's worth paying $5-10/month for their main online platform.

Maybe the main area of concern for Discord should be whether these young users keep their subscriptions as they age.

It's all relative. Gamers are a heck of a lot more price averse than corporations, and the same person is more likely to spend money on a service that helps his/her business than one used for video games.

Well to me the question is:

How many too-young-to-work online gamers are there who have parents willing to pay for their subscriptions / games / in-game purchases?

We already know that these kids who don't have enough (or any of their own) money have a computer, internet access, and the ability to purchase all of the peripherals and a game needed to play. What's making companies stop and say, "We don't think the people who made these non-working kids positioned to be our customers (e.g. they have the minimum hardware needed to play their game / products) will spend any more money on them."?

Are there more kids whose parents buy them computers and allow them to play games than there are corporations / businesses?

Do all corporations / businesses and products made for corp/bus only allow for micro-transactions or are their products a monthly/yearly subscription fee (fixed rate) or is it a one time purchase?

Are we expecting future generations to stop buying computers and games for their children? Are we expecting children to stop being born or stop growing old enough to be able to use our products?

It's a demographic that's got infinite potential and every year there is a new set of customers. And, if you get on any single customer's good side they can become loyal, paying customers when they reach an age where they are no longer price-averse.

I certainly expect children to stop being born. Looking at how expensive it is to raise even one, I quickly see it become an upper class thing to be able to afford a child.

Unlikely to ever happen. History suggests that the way evolutionary biology corrects this is revolution or invasion :-)

That's a very interesting statement. Could you share some more information about what events in history or research in "evolutionary biology" suggest this ?

I don't know where to start searching from for this information...

Nothing direct from what I've read but I'm extrapolating from various "decline and fall of X civilization(s)" - all great societies have been through a phase where the society no longer produces enough defenders and the ones alive lack vitality to protect against relatively primitive less technologically sophisticated "barbarians".

Also, what we're seeing happenning in Europe right now on immigration. Japan is a bit weird right now.

most people will have children anyway.

The irony is that as people grow richer, they tend to have less children.

> Gamers are a heck of a lot more price averse than corporations

Aren’t gaming computers super-high margin?

At retail prices but I’ve never known anyone besides rich people or rich grandparents that can afford to spend $2500+ (video cards are well above $600 for high end and the other components at retail tend to get inflated similar to how Apple pads their SKUs around) so a teen can mess around playing games (mostly looking at it from the lens of how I was raised and the attitudes of my elders as well as my non-nerd friends). The usual ignorant gift giver would have bought a console or something towards the console like games or an online subscription.

The areas usually where margins come from are:

1. Skimping on PSU quality 2. Reduced motherboard features 3. Adding LEDs as a “value add” (why earlier this year RAM with LEDs we’re going on sale ahead of the non-LED RAM)

That depends a great deal on the part, and—again—what is "high" relative to other products. nVidia's Quadro cards have much higher margins than the models targeting gamers.

Prebuilt maybe have some nice margin, but I don't know any gamers who haven't bought their PC custom, or assembled by the retailer. Those have very thin margins, both component manufacturers and retailers have very stiff competition.

But a lot more people game then run businesses.

Slack charges per person, not per business.

At least, they do for the plans I'm familiar with. I don't know what Slack's giant enterprise agreements are like, but I imagine they're still getting paid plenty per-user.

> I know a lot of people who do not have much money, but they still consider it worth it to spend a chunk of their limited income on Discord Nitro.

I'm often surprised the type of people who are willing to pay for Nitro on Discord just for the cross-channel and animated emoticon support. I've been in communities with college students who despite posting how they're struggling to pay the rent will still keep up their Nitro subscription. The majority won't be subscribers (like most services with a free tier) but I think some underestimate those who would be, especially when targeting a mostly gaming demographic which I think has changed over the years in terms of spending habits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com