This post was inspired by two things I saw recently: The connection between these two items is not obvious, but it is interesting. The lemon problem WeFunder, for the uninitiated, is a crowdfunding platform for (primarily) technology companies. It allows community-oriented startups to sell a small % of ownership to their users and supporters.
Great article. Make your community your unfair advantage. But why call it unfair? Unfair to whom? To those who try to nickel and dime their players with MTX and the same shit every year? Nah i don’t think that’s unfair. Unfair only perhaps to indie developers, but then again everyone starts somewhere and they could imagine that when they are doing quality work that a community will flock around them.
I’d say unfair to the really big players (Ubi, Activision/Blizzard, EA) who push out broken games with predatory mechanics and little of actual value. The companies that don’t see their players as a community, but a cash pit to dig value out of for their shareholders.
Then I’m absolutely fine with it being unfair :)
Me too
Remembering Habe once saying in an interview that valve isn’t a public stock company because they want players as their customers, not stockholders.
I think the author was using the word “unfair” semi-sarcastically as a reference to the twitter drama.
Because it’s a clickbaity word, it’s not actually unfair by any means, just a different method to secure funding.
I swear, the word “clickbait” has completely lost its meaning, with the way folks throw it around like they do.
Sort of using it as a catch all umbrella for “wording a title in such a way to try and get people scrolling by to rubberneck” and go “oh, unfair? That sounds controversial”.
It’s an absolutely good move to word it in such a way that piques curiosity, and yes I’m sure there’s a line in there somewhere between being clickbaity with no real substance, and using intriguing wording in a title, I’m just so critical of wording things that way that I’d make an abysmal journalist.
And this article absolutely has a lot of substance, I wouldn’t say the whole thing is clickbait by any means, just that the word is used in a similar fashion in the title, sort of a hook that relies on an emotional knee jerk of wanting to see how unfair it really is or not.
Yeah, that’s called a “hook,” not “click bait.” A hook is meant to, like the name suggests, hook you in. Click bait is something of low value designed just to make you click on it so you look at at ads it’s trying to feed you.
It’s the difference between “childish” and “childlike.” One is good, the other is not.
It’s just an unfortunate aspect of the word clickbait. A hook baits you to click, definitively, and so the true meaning of clickbait will be diluted and used as a shorthand for a range of types of titles. You’re right, though, clickbait has a seriously negative connotation, and I was kind of a dick in my comment for going straight to that instead of saying hook.
I see them as one in the same. You put bait on a hook in fishing, both to lure in your catch. It’s just a new term for the internet age.