Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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I have two thoughts about this.

First, respond to every inquiry by telling them the price is USD$70,000,000.00. And stick to that price. Many of these sleazy companies get their leads from the same "lead generators," who will eventually take you off their lists because they know your terms are unreasonable. It doesn't work for everyone, but when I did it to spammers trying to buy my mailing list, it significantly reduced the volume of inquiries.

Second, put a page on your web site listing all of the offending companies, with links to the letter you received.

Apr 1, 2021 - Company X promised $3-5k/month if I alter your search results. Link.

Apr 3, 2021 - Company Y promised $1-5k/month if I promote thier product on other people's web pages. Link.

A lot of people on HN will claim "O, noes! Lawyers! Libel!" I wouldn't worry about it. These people don't have the money for lawyers, are usually in geographies without legal systems, and don't want their names and other information exposed in a public legal filing. Plus, all you're doing is stating facts.

> by telling them the price is USD$70,000,000.00

There's a W C Fields joke that ends, "Madame, we've already established what sort of woman you are, now we're just haggling over price."

Every time they make a lower offer counter with a higher price. They will soon learn what kind of person they are dealing with.

If they actually do come up with $120,000,000 - will at that point nobody will be surprised that you cashed out. They might be mad, but they won't blame you.

Case in point: Notch once said that his price for selling out Minecraft was $2B. When Microsoft eventually said "sounds fair" and gave it to him very few people found it easy to be mad at him.

To be fair, people found plenty of other things to be mad at Notch about.

That occurred a few years later

They did, but it was all pretty unrelated. I thought GP's example was a good one.

that was not what people got mad at notch about

People got mad at Notch for internet-age old reasons: expecting someone with high technical skills in one domain to have the right takes on social and political issues because they're now a internet social presence in addition to whatever creative work they've done. If people were realistic in their expectations of Notch, they'd never have been mad in the first place because they wouldn't have cared what inane ideas he spouted.

I don't think people on the internet are expected to "[take] on social and political issues"; they are expected to not be a piece of shit though. It costs $0 to not be a dick on the internet. It's free to not voice your opinion. You're not less of a person if you self-censor.

I wonder what the calculus was on the Microsoft side of the equation.

"It'd take more than 10-SWE-years to build a clone, so we should take his offer"?

They are paying for the brand, not the product. Microsoft is ensuring that they have mindshare in the next generation of gamers. That's critically important to maintaining their ongoing success in the gaming sector.

Similar to why Disney paid billions for Star Wars: the company was easily capable of replicating the product; the issue was replicating the brand. That brand has a proven track record of multi-generational appeal.

I think it's more than just the brand right? I can't speak for Disney and Star Wars because Star Wars was never my thing.

These creative endeavours have a soul, or an essence, for want of a better term. You can replicate a game or a movie and it will feel utterly soulless compared to the original, even if you can't visibly notice a difference.

You could reproduce Minecraft but even the most infinitesimal divergence from the original will make it feel fake. Maybe the controls have a different 'feel', or the way the scene is rendered feels a bit off. It's just not Minecraft any more. There are just so many quirks and details that will be lost in the translation, or even patched over if they're seen as bugs.

It's no different if you ported a game from Unity to Unreal and then to CryEngine. I'm sure that with a blind comparison you would be able to 'feel' the difference.

And the same for films. The way these things were created has a lot of influence over the end result.

On the other hand, it's exactly what can make a remake or remaster so successful. The Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes that followed Resi 7 were phenomenal! Not totally faithful to the originals, didn't try to be...they just took an older game and gave it a new life.

I think you've just described a brand.

People don't go to Starbucks because it's the best, they go to Starbucks because mocha frappucinos in Lima and London taste exactly the same. Any divergence, even an infinitesimal one, makes the frap feel fake.

You could recreate the brand and the product, and you still won’t have millions of users playing it. They bought the user base, too.

A brand is not just trade dress. It's a relationship between a company and the public. Recreating the brand means building those relationships.

Which can be done, but it is a long process. Most attempts only get a fraction of the big brand, and the exceptions generally have more to do with the failings of the big brand than the competition. Once people find something they like, as long as that thing doesn't do something stupid they won't be in a hurry to look at the competition in general. If there is any switching cost they are even less interested in trying something else. Which means that the not number one competitors need to be perfect in everything - which is hard when they are not getting as much revenue to begin with, and thus cannot afford to try out any seemingly good ideas that turn out bad only after you try them...

Reminds me of the quests to recreate the secret recipe for Coca-cola.

The secret ingredient isn't orange peel, it's $4 billion a year in marketing.

Sure, marketing is important. But the "secret" ingredient is coca leaf extract. The actual cocaine is used to make various drugs by a different corporation.

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-the-cocaine...

According to Business Insider, the beverage company has a deal with the Drug Enforcement Administration to get coca leaves so that the world can get its Coca-Cola fix. The DEA lets Coca-Cola import coca leaves from Peru and Bolivia in order to get the part of its secret recipe, which it hides behind the term "natural flavors" on the ingredients list.

They rewrote anyways.

Well yeah, but they could use the brand, likeness and source code of the original; if they created a clone (and there are clones, hundreds of them) it would NEVER have gotten even one percent of the share. Plus there's the merchandise. There is an existing market for Minecraft merchandise, and a clone could never even get close to that network.

I mean how many kids do you see walking around in "Cube World" T-shirts? CastleMiner? FortressCraft? Take your pick: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/lx5g3/complete_l...

Wait, they value one SWE-year at $200,000,000?

Funny point, but I assume they mean ten years for a problem they throw whole, enormous teams at.

My buddy loves buying and selling stuff from the local newspaper. Whenever people give a low ball offer he looks them directly in the face and in a very confident manner says: "I'm accepting asking price or anything higher!"

The looks on people's faces are incredible.

I sold a Chrome extension I wrote in the early days of extensions (for a lot less than $120M and with a lot less users, but meaningful numbers for both). It wasn't clear then just how bad the malware problem was.

People still blamed me.

There's a big difference between retirement money and day-job money, which applies both to this and the joke.

In the joke, $1m was offered. I don't know when he made that joke, but since he died in 1948, that's somewhere over $15m now. And houses were ridiculously cheap by modern standards, so that would have been retirement money for sure.

I have no problem being "that sort of women" for USD$70,000,000.00, over a browser extension.

> A lot of people on HN will claim "O, noes! Lawyers! Libel!"

Libel is for false statements. If you've got a real email from the company then it's not false.

In the USA, not true in the UK, for example.

Truth is a defence in the UK. If I read the Wikipedia article correctly, it's a defence everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law

There are differences: in the USA the statement is assumed true, and must be proved false if libel is to succeed. In the UK the statement is presumed to be false, and the libel will succeed unless proved true.

I wonder what the GDPR has to say about publishing a private email?

The difference on the UK really comes down to the cost of defending oneself. Engaging in a court case is not a costly undertaking and this would likely be a quick in-and-out case, as long as you have the evidence to backup their claims.

I imagine either party in an email conversation have the right to publish the email, unless some terms were agreed in advance or the subject is expressly personal.

AFAIK, for ordinary snail mail ownership goes to the recipient in most (all?) European countries: You can't claim copyright on a letter you sent to someone else. Can't see why the same shouldn't go for e-mail. If you wanted something to remain “private”, don't give it to someone. (At least not without having them sign an NDA first).

Sure, but that need not stop them from suing, which will cost you time and money, even if (when) you win.

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