It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

Just a few more billion dollars .

We’re so close!

Newzbin.

Yay!

Does NZ count as Australia too? Or are we stuck with parallel importers, or picking one up on holiday?

If they know we have savings. They’ll just increase prices again to take them.

Social/Mobile games. So an already predatory industry. Let’s get people addicted to a game, and then suck as much money from them as possible.

In the industry, we definitely weren’t the only ones doing it. And really we were only doing basic stuff (it was all in house developed middleware, so effort vs reward didn’t make much sense to go hard) I wouldn’t be surprised if others were going deep.

• the hardest part is getting someone to part with their money. But once they’ve done it once, even for the smallest amount, the second purchase will be easier.
• conversions that stopped playing got emails with discounts.
• whales got freebies when they lost to keep them happy.
• everything else was just finding the customers perfect price.
• ultimately we were selling noting. So any sale is better than no sale. You can’t make a loss on a number in a database.

Everything was broken down into campaigns (we’d have multiple running at any one time) targeting different segments. Then we’d track the conversion, sale, and retention numbers of those campaigns against each other. Sometimes one campaign might flop for one segment but not another, so we’d retarget with a new one.

I don’t think it’s used much in other markets. I know Twilio has Segment, that could be used to do segmented pricing but I’ve never really seen it done in other industries.

I wouldn’t say it’s jaded me. It has made me conscious of my data footprint. I don’t play mobile or f2p games. But I am weary. The COVID greed-flation showed the mindset of businesses. It might not be long until targeted pricing becomes worthwhile to make number go up (still), and hidden under the guise of “lowering prices”.

You don’t need a monopoly for this to be a problem.

Databrokers can offer data sets of “customer price elasticity”. Tables of “how much we think X would spend on these generic item categories”. Eg “booly would pay $15 for a burger, vs $10 average”

Point of Sale systems could start offering integrations to these data sets.

All shops have to do now is set a list price, a minimum price, a category, and leave it up to the PoS to (not) give discounts.

You want a burger, you’re fed a single-use short lived discount “$5 off a $20 burger. Today only” While someone else gets “buy one get one free”.

It’s then a ‘fair’ market. Shops have and ‘compete’ with their (high) list prices, data brokers compete with “excess profit” statistics (ie, how much more money above the minimum price they made). Nobody is colluding, they’re just basing discounts off external arbitrary signals.

It slowly becomes the norm to get just-in-time discounts, and the consumer gets shafted. If you’re not in the system, you’re paying more than everyone else.

(And all of this has been happening in some markets for over a decade)

In a past life I wrote the software that did this.

It’s not just about charging more when you’re desperate. It’s also things like charging you less to keep you addicted, or getting you hooked. Exploiting your emotions and behaviour to make it effective. A small loss on you now could be a long time gain for them.

Some more scenarios:

• you’ve decided to quit alcohol. Your social media accounts are used to identify you’re looking for advice. They advertise more, and send you heavy, heavy discounts a few days in to keep you on the wagon.
• Your cars insurance tracker has picked up your erratic driving. Your phone has tracked more forceful interactions, your works email provider has revealed you’ve been in a minimum of three meetings all day; You’re having a shit, stressful, day. They can’t give you discounts on your cigarettes but they do know they can get you to buy two packs instead of one by serving you ads that suggest stock levels are low. You buy two and chain smoke all day, your daily average goes from 0.5 to 0.7 packs a day.
• You go to a chain restaurant often. They know they can get you to buy more in the long run if they increase the volume you eat gradually. Every visit they goad you into buying more. Didn’t do it last time? Steeper discounts next time. Until one day you buy the extra side. That’s now your new baseline. A few weeks of that and back onto the stair climb. A little by little. You’re spending more and more.
• you’re on holiday. everyone knows you’re not coming back anytime soon so they charge full price. But move to a new city? Everyone has discounts for you to get you in the door.

The data available back then was pretty minimal, effectively only the data we generated. But it was still enough to prey on your lizard brain. With data brokerage I’ve got no idea what level of evils we could have done.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

Same volume, just increased length but reduced girth.

Why would it result in zero women playing? I’m not suggesting you merge the women’s teams with the open team.

But have it so your women’s teams performance counts just as much as the men’s.

Two teams (men’s and women’s), each playing against their own gender, scoring points in one league.

No point paying your dudes millions per season to get the best players if your women’s team sucks and loses every game.

Get teams and fans an incentive to invest and in both genders by playing for the same trophy.

Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.

Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.

It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

The number 3 doesn’t exist at Valve

Like the article mentions, PSO was released on the Dreamcast, and had an MMO component.

Not sure what this would have done different?

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

Yep, This is taken straight from Facebooks advertisements circa 2018, maybe still today.

Put each character in a spans with random classes, intersperse other random characters all over the place also with random classes, then make the unwanted characters hidden.

Bonus points if you use css to shuffle the order of letters too.

Accessibility? Pffffft.

I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.

And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.

I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.