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Comment by jrs99 | Hacker News Reader

The most lucrative path is NEVER to rip your customers off or sell a basket of virtual blueberries to children for 50 dollars each.

That's the solution of someone thinking one quarter ahead.

If a game company cannot find a way to be profitable without IAPs it might want to find something else to do besides make games.

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> The most lucrative path is NEVER to rip your customers off

Las Vegas begs to disagree with you.

That's because Las Vegas is actually fair to the extreme. The odds are in place, they are what they are, and if you hit the lucky number, you win all the golds. There's no deception at all, except for that people enforce on themselves when they go there expecting to be that lucky winner.

Not quite.

As a simple example, slot machines are actually implemented as raffle tickets, not mechanical random generators. But not losing plays are deceptively displayed as being "almost" winners. You get a "star star (half star, half bar)" far more often than if the machine behaved the way it appeared.

Then of course you have free alcohol during bad decisions, no clocks, upsells for crap like "insurance" at blackjack....

And if you play blackjack as well as possible, they kick you out.

Why would they? Isn't it impossible to beat blackjack in a long run with 6 decks and such?

Not impossible, but you do have to do some brazen, easily-detected stuff like watch the table for awhile and refuse to sit down unless the count goes positive.

What's that old line..."The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

Similarly, even though a player may lose asymptotically to the house, they can be quite annoying in the short run.

Vegas is not ripping you off. Vegas is selling entertainment of the game, not winning. Except small percentage of professional gamblers, most people won't go to Vegas if not for the experience that surrounds the gambling process. Otherwise you could just as well play state lottery or gamble on forex markets online. Would also save on the plane ticket.

I was using "Vegas" as shorthand for "the gambling industry". Which is selling an addictive product that makes people worse off in direct proportion to the amount they consume. Which, yes, sells the hope of winning. Talk to anybody on a flight to Vegas and ask them if they hope to win. If they're playing, they're not playing to lose.

There's a difference between hoping to win and hoping to win being only reason of going there. If you ask me whether I hope to be a billionaire one day, I'd say, sure, why not, I'll take it. But that's different from actually working on becoming one.

But if they are happy to spend their money on the playing of the game...it's not like they are being tricked any more than the purchaser of an overpriced handbag.

Go to Vegas. Look at the expressions on the faces of people playing. Almost nobody looks happy there.

As far as I know, handbag addiction is not a serious problem. Gambling addiction is.

No kidding. Some say the odds are known, so you're not being ripped off, but that's not always the case. Beyond that, there is a science behind separating you from your money: free drinks, no clocks, no windows, ugly carpet and ceilings to keep you focused on the games, slot machine sounds, and likely a bunch of other stuff that we don't even know.

I'd say undertaking such a massive clandestine effort to liberate you from your cash is pretty customer-hostile.

I don't think the successful casinos today are as profitable as they could be. I believe they can be MUCH more profitable than they are now.

Then you fail to understand the sheer amount of analytics and data casinos use to tweak everything to "perfection"...

But but but San Francisco hipsters invented data science! No-one was optimizing their businesses based on numerical data before!

And you fail to understand the sheer amount of incompetence present in the gaming industry. You also overestimate the amount of anayltics (or even anything you could call math) happening in the gaming industry.

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/mar/11/sahara-hotel-cas...

casinos fail all the time.

i'm not talking about keeping what casinos have right now and "tweaking" that. I'm talking about a reimagining.

Casinos fail all the time because they as everyone else have fixed cost, and in the Las Vegas style casinos especially because they are not just casinos but massive hotels or resorts where the fixed costs are absolutely huge. There's certainly lots of room for innovation in that area, and in attracting gamblers.

Casinos don't generally fail because they don't know how to tweak the odds.

I think you and girvo are talking about different things.

Why is that not the most lucrative path?

That seems to be the most lucrative path by far. There are always more whales that make serving the 99% of players worthwhile.

Most people just copy whatever everyone else is doing without thinking about it very hard. Hopefully people will eventually get tired of being nickle and dimed by their video games, and come to appreciate the advantage of paying upfront for a game and being done with it.

It is sort of funny to see people arguing about the most appropriate way to finance the activity of wasting time. There of plenty of games, movies, books, etc for people who want value for money, lots even of free value, and plenty of free crap to waste time.

There are now enough good games in the universe that I have trouble imagining the person who can legitimately think, "I have too much time, I should play some garbage to fill it."

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