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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

That page seems to summarize as "publishers worry about piracy, so they reject original content and force sequels/sports/crap" (... that makes zero sense to me, but to continue) plus "an original-content game maker will stop developing for the DS when publishers force sequels/ports/crap".

And they're all fearing the ecosystem decline that occurs when the publishers start forcing crap.

I mean... I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.

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>I think I can point to the cause of the problem in that relationship. And I won't be pointing at the pirates.

Either way, they are the gatekeepers to please, so the sentiment of:

>The widespread availability of those devices dramatically shrank the market for NDS games.

does hold true. I heard reports of this especially affecting the PSP as well.

>Either way, they are the gatekeepers to please

Some markets that have started to oust those gatekeepers seem to be doing fairly well, lending weight behind arguments that the gatekeepers are the real problem. Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades, as are video games in general (particularly on PC, where piracy has been even bigger for even longer).

I don't doubt that some things that are working with the current gatekeeping ecosystem will cease to exist if gatekeepers get less powerful. ... but I'm not sure those are things we should be keeping anyway. Sucks in the transition, to be sure, but in the long run?

> Music is booming despite massive piracy for decades

Music's "booming" is pretty closely correlated with the uptake of DRM streaming services versus non-DRMed files. Remarkably so, in fact.

Yeah, I'll definitely agree with that.

It is still part of a very, very large shift in power away from the historical gatekeepers though (i.e. from "all-powerful overlords" to "anyone can sign up with any of the big DRM streaming platforms today, and there are moderately-sized others too"). Gatekeepers as a whole can be beneficial in a lot of ways, but they tend to turn into power-amassing despots given time. A bit of churn helps reset that to some degree.

I guess the main difference here is that historically (going back decades here) you had to use the gatekeepers to do things at literally any scale beyond handing out records by hand. They effectively controlled all physical sales, and physical sales were the only option. Now there are many more viable options, including stuff like bandcamp where there are few restrictions or costs of any kind. Gatekeepers of portions of a market will always exist, the difference is in how much power they wield over the entire marketplace.

I'm not sure PC is the greatest example of your thesis anymore given that a lot of major releases are protected by Denuvo.

Eh, if I stab a guy every time you touch a tomato it is literally true that "touching tomatoes causes death", but the sentence does leave out a crucial part of the mechanism - that it's less the tomato, and more me and my stabby knife.

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