Well if they refuse you can't really force them, they might have legitimate reasons to turn clients away but I agree that this is not efficient and since you cited mindfactory I add that in Italy in the hardware business there have been many popular companies with competitive prices that were shut down by authorities for tax evasion.

Money is not free anymore.

The marketing cost is not included, the budget for the average AAA game is probably very close to half a billion.

It still provides value

Which is different than making money.

I think that none of the top 10 most valuable (to me) websites generate any sort of direct revenue (many, not even indirect) to their owners.

But they're immensely valuable.

Try to substitute "grumpy" with "informed".

I was thinking about this yesterday and in other threads people are writing about similar systems. The key thing for me and the word that keeps getting written is "RSS", I want a powerful client to experience different content in different ways. There are many communities and content creators that I want to follow but it's too complicated with modern platforms. From a usability standpoint it's bad both for creators and for end users, the result of this is that you miss out on some important stuff.

For example I might not have time to watch Twitch streams or Youtube videos from a creator over a couple months but I would still be able to go to a weekend event in my city or buy some some new merch that he announced. In general I would need to use another platform to not miss out (Twitter, Instagram).

If I controlled a client capable of aggregating all types of content I could decide to filter things out according to my immediate needs.

Content creators would own their own platform or choose a generic service provider and have freedom about what to make (video, image or text posts) and how to monetize.

The problems are who pays who, content discovery, and a decently sized userbase.

I only use RSS to convey the concept of a standardized syndication system, thus "like" being used rather than saying RSS itself....

But yes, what you say is exactly the point of what I'm talking about.

Some sites would focus on being the universal front end for casual browsing while others would focus on niche purposes such as moderation or unique content types/presentations.

The data would be stored with the user by default in my model, ensuring they have control of their content, and offloading a bunch of the delivery work from the front end site (essentially every users SSO becomes the cdn for their chunk of the content).

It has some problems but it's really not much different than now except it's easy as pie for people to get eyeballs on their content (does mean monetization has some issues, as it does now).

Imrambling.....

I agree with you completely, I always found federated platforms confusing to use and they still run into the same problems that billion dollar platforms have without the resources to solve or mitigate them.

Thank you for sharing this paper, it is an interesting topic.

How is this company doing?

Is it really that complicated from a legal and support perspective? For legal/platform compliance I feel that it shouldn't be that different between platform, most of the work should be the initial familiarization with the requirements or are they changing all the time like crazy? Support should be proportional to the number of users. If the game is multiplayer/ live service I see that things might get seriously daunting if you don't have either a good number of sales or the capacity to coordinate the whole team.

It’s not complicated for a small team, but it is for a large public company.