Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Well... no surprise. It's the classic version, and you can buy it for $0.99 and have all the content, all the powerups, and none of the ads. Too good a deal for 2023.

View on HN

Tbf, it's not the original version - it's specifically the "Rovio Classic: Angry Birds" which is a remake of the original, using their newer engine - and yes, it has ads already integrated. The original version(released 2009!) has been delisted long long time ago.

If a gas station finds they can't sell gas at $2 per gallon, they could rip out the gas tanks and stop selling gas or they could raise the price to whatever is profitable. I'm not understanding the business logic of removing the game.

The owner of the gas station also sells crack cocaine on the side. The longer people stay to fill up their vehicle, the more likely it is they'll purchase some crack cocaine. Right now, most of their clientele fill up without leaving their car, but the ones with electric cars will stay for up to an hour. So, considering both the refueling business and the crack cocaine business, the best move is to rip up the gas pumps and install more electric vehicle chargers.

You don't even need the sensationalist reference to crack — this is already plausible with gas stations being convenience stores (and sometimes much more).

Indeed. Modern gas stations make very little money selling gas. They make money by people buying the stuff in their store.

I don't think many intentionally lose money on gas though. If they weren't covering the cost of the gas, they would raise the price, which seems like a rational thing to do for a popular game.

Quite a few do intentionally lose money on the gas itself, but it depends on the circumstances for the particular station. They consider the gas a loss leader. People are very price-conscious when it comes to gas and will drive far out out of their way to save a couple of pennies. Very few gas stations can afford to price their gas higher than other gas stations, and there is very often a price war going on between stations.

But even the ones who don't lose money are nearly always only breaking even on the gas.

It's a lot like how movies theaters make basically nothing from the ticket sales for the movie. They make their money at the concession stand.

I wish this comment could be printed on billboards all around Silicon Valley and just put up everywhere, just to get all those folks thinking about what they're doing with their lives.

What if a gas station finds that people keep fueling up and then driving off -- the customers don't seem to want to plaster their cars with bumper stickers related to the advertisers who are paying extra to the gas station and they don't seem to want to use the fuel "filter" that requires you to put a small extra charge on your credit card every few miles or the fuel won't move from the tank to the engine?

For the sake of profitability, I could imagine the gas station might choose to stop selling gas through pumps since those simply couldn't be as profitable.

> What if a gas station finds that people keep fueling up and then driving off

I'd assume the price of gas would go up once they found it wasn't being subsidized by other sales.

It's not a simple matter of the organization making the most rational decision for the interests of the organization. Individuals throughout the organization have an incentive to suppress past products to make newer products, and by extension themselves and their own careers, look better in comparison. Organizations can behave irrationally when the constituent members of the organization have incentives that puts them at odds with the rational interests of the organization itself.

Yeah, sounds like they could have just raised the price of the original. But I guess they are convinced that this would still cannibalise their other offerings, which I suppose monetise better.

So it's more like you having two gas stations next to each other - one with a price per gallon and nothing else, one with a more confusing user experience that yields more dollars per gallon of fuel than a fixed price.

The thing with mobile games is that you make 90% of your money on 0.001% of your players - the big spenders. It's "better" to have a free game where a wealthy player can spend $10k on gems or whatever, than a one-time paid game. It's a sad state of the market, but that's how the big companies make money.

They may still keep both. The bug spenders will not play the original one - it becomes challenging at some point and does not have gems.

Yes, but if the original non-monetized version is result number 1 or 2 when searching for "angry birds" in the store, then the big spenders might never come across the version you want them to come across. You can't "fix" that by just increasing the price of the original game.

Applications on the App Store need continuous maintenance and updates.

I realize that, but it seems that a wildly successful older game would probably be able to amortize that cost over quite a few people still buying it at $3, $5, or $10.

It’s hard to get people to pay for anything anymore.

For instance, Soul Caliber was ported to iOS and it costs $10. I think I might have been one of the few people who bought it.

It seems like the only way that you can make non scammy games make sense is via subscriptions like with Apple Arcade and even then it’s probably a loss leader for Apple and they subsidize game makers.

This is partially the fault of the App Store model that doesn’t allow upgrade pricing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com