In Game Economies

I should probably mention that this is pretty much how valve makes all of their money at this point.

There isn't a cost associated with it at all, valve just sits back and rakes in a cut of other people's economic output.

>>1402462

the answer is Augmented reality

>>1402462
we've already gone down this path a great while ago, and as you mentioned the way to monetize on it is to be the distributor.

I don't know, things are still in motion. The whole "digital goods" thing is very fishy.

First off, it's a misnomer, they're not selling you any goods, they're selling you the right to access, which is usually made non-transferrable and subject to change. Hence why Amazon can (and does) just remove books you bought on Kindle because Amazon lost the rights. Also, non-transferrable means you can't resell used digital goods and more importantly you can't bequeathe those. so as of now digital goods fill the same function as physical goods (games, music CDs, books), but 95% of digital goods cannot be inherited by your children. It hasn't come up a lot, but once the current generation starts dying, who has iTunes, Steam and Kindle libraries on the order of thousands of dollars shit will hit the fan.

And there's no telling what'll happen. Either they keep the status quo, then it'll be lucrative as hell, because you're selling the same songs to every generation. Or it'll break down, because once you have a perfect digital copy in your family you can just pass it around to everyone forever and long-tails will stop being a thing.

We'll see.