what about the future?

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Tim Brooks

Let me ask one question. If you were starting a business and you were told that you could either:

1) sell 100,000 units of your product at $10.00 each (Gross $1,000,000) but you would have to hire 50 people to support that effort or

2) you could sell 1 unit of your product at $1,000,000 and you wouldn't have to hire anyone, you could do all the work yourself,

which would you do?

This is a totally false dichotomy for so many reasons, and that fact should be patently obvious. Such as

-the nature of things that sell for $10 is totally different than the nature of things that sell for $1mil. Assuming you were starting a business with a product in mind (ie, you're sensible), you don't have a choice.

-There's no way it takes 50 people to sell 100,000 of anything digital. The top watched youtube video has 253 million views. Now, granted, it took a production team to make it (but that's your 1 unit you're making in the other case too - people needed to make it are set before you start moving product), but it only took a single person to upload it to youtube.

Now, i grant its not a sold product, but it only takes one person to make a webpage and write a little code to e-mail a game key automatically with game purchase, or whatever code you feel like writing to handle digital distribution of a game. It probably took more people than that to create the game. Heck, that code already exists.

So, necessary costs to selling a game in this day and age of digital distribution:
-game development
-bandwidth
-advertising

Where are these 50 people getting involved in any way that's germain to your question and this topic? The actual process of selling the game? Requires like an hour or two of one person's time to write the necessary code, assuming you want to do so from scratch.

I could go on, but its obvious the question is pointless. Hypotheticals that will never occur aren't relevant.

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Regarding depth vs. graphics. I don't see why there can't be both. I mean, a dom4 that was simply code-cleaning and graphics overhaul would be worthwhile. And I don't even care about graphics personally, but I do think there would be a positive impact on the size of the community because lots of people do.