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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this concept is hopelessly flawed, but solving your "cold start problem" (read the book if you haven't) is going to be super hard.

Also, I would never use your service because of DRM. GOG doesn't do DRM and always has many indie games on sale, which seems like a better value prop? I don't think the Spotify analogy works because games are already very cheap. I have a large backlog of games I'll never get around to playing, and so does everybody else. Being able to choose from millions of songs on Spotify is way better than having to buy individual albums, but I don't need access to a large game library.

Maybe this is another "less space than a nomad" kind of comment, but my intuition is that indie games are mostly played by older gamers who are happy to just buy a game they want to play. Go to gog.com and see how many games you can get for the $100 a year you plan to charge.

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I am probably an outlier to the general public, but I am an older gamer interesting in playing mostly old games.

And like you on both Steam and GOG I have a backlog of hundreds of games. Games I mostly acquired through Humble Bundle and GOG sales or giveaways. Nowadays I vastly prefer buying on GOG over Steam, due to feeling I am more in ownership of the games due to no DRM. I can download the games and make back-ups in case GOG ever goes down.

I will probably never be able to play all the games I bought, but even then devs and publishers should have gotten some money from me. Would not happen if it weren’t for Humble Bundle & GOG sales, cause I like to buy cheap.

> And like you on both Steam and GOG I have a backlog of hundreds of games.

The last time I found some stats (five years ago), MOST accounts had hundreds of games, most of which were never played (playtime < 2 hours, I think).

Luckily, the developer still got paid. With MagnaPlay, the developers will never get paid unless the game is played.

In other words, this looks like a bad deal for developers, while also looking like a bad deal for gamers![1]

I can't really see any way for this to take off.

[1] For gamers, the DRM is an unnecessary hurdle, and GOG solves that. The lack of titles is also a hurdle (remember, this is only for indie titles).

I don't mean to sound rude, but honestly, if this was the team's original idea for YC, then either the two co-founders are extremely qualified and talented, or YC has begun funding moonshots in the dark. It doesn't take much thinking to easily conclude that it's a bad deal for devs.

In one of PGs essays he outright said that VCs don't fund ideas, they fund people.

IOW, they decide whether the founders pitching them an idea are going to generate a return, not whether the idea being pitched will generate a return.

Great book, already read it! I don't think GOG is very good for the developers, and not having DRM would also harm our business as we'd miss out on subscribers that pirate games and leave.

I appreciate your opinion on the value prop too. I'm curious though, is there anything you feel is missing out from these other stores that maybe we could do?

You don't have to prematurely worry about losing subscribers when you're bottlenecked at getting new subscribers. Even if you have 10% monthly churn because of piracy that's fine because it means your service is good enough for gamers to sign up in the first place! The strategic (but not very nice) thing to do is to introduce DRM long after you've got traction. Right now, DRM is a solution for a problem you don't have.

Other than exclusives, I can't think of anything that would tempt me to join your platform.

That’s a very good point very well put - I fully subscribe. At that stage the problem is players and catalogue - focus on those extremely hard, don’t misplace your limited efforts into solving a not yet existing issue.

Edit: typos

I always think thoughts like this miss that the value prop right now is for "People who want to play games". By not having DRM, you're getting more customers, but you're also expanding your TAM to include "People who want to pirate games."

The reason "add DRM later" is problematic is that you hit product market fit with the a lot of the second group, meaning they will be upset when you add it.

> I always think thoughts like this miss that the value prop right now is for "People who want to play games". By not having DRM, you're getting more customers, but you're also expanding your TAM to include "People who want to pirate games."

That's valid if the target market is "people who want to play games". It's not in this case, it's "people who want to play indie games", which is a different target. By removing DRM, it's expanded to include "people who want pirate indie games" which is a ridiculously tiny segment.

> The reason "add DRM later" is problematic is that you hit product market fit with the a lot of the second group, meaning they will be upset when you add it.

So? These are gamers we are talking about. Bugginess, poor quality and everything else that they claim upsets them still doesn't stop them from buying the game!

> I don't think GOG is very good for the developers,

I don't think that matters in the context of revenue for a business - if you want paying customers, then you have to offer people value for the money they hand over, which GOG does.

If you could distil the value you are offering to customers in just a few short sentences, what would those sentences be?

Anyway, good luck :-)

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