> The lottery definitely has worse odds, I just don't think that's saying much.
Absolutely. People tend to assume that 95% of video games turn a profit, when it's the reverse. There are highly polished, incredibly high quality video games who simply just don't sell.
What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is? They make cents on every can. Something like 2-3%.
The video games industry is filled to the brim with gatekeepers who take their cuts. Valve takes 30%, just for their store. Publishers start at 10%. Your engine might take a cut.
Estimating that Stardew Valley, the big success video game with the lowest overhead bar none, has made 10% profit might be too low. 20%? Might be high.
> What do you think the profit margin of canned goods is?
For whom? The manufacture? It's closer to 10-30% for the manufacture (lower for white label goods, higher for "premium" brands). And it's higher for products that enjoy monopoly status.
For retailers, it's 2-3%, but retailers also get products on loan and negotiate various agreements that help cover the costs of displays, shipping, marketing, and wastage. So even that small percentage margin is skewed a bit.
There's a reason that retailers and food manufactures ("canned goods") were some of the largest American companies prior to technology taking off. It's a highly profitable industry.
He used this open source engine, it is free. He is almost certainly getting between 60-70% of revenue after distribution fees. His only other expenses are taxes and the other devs he employs and he was solo until the game made like $100 million. Most of the copies sold for $15 so it seems fair to me to say his companies lifetime revenue is close to $10*number of units sold which is close to half a billion dollars. And since the companies expenses are effectively zero profit is the same. If he’s smart with taxes he’s paid 15% corporate tax rate then 15% capital gains rate which comes out to just under 28% so his own lifetime earnings is probably around $360 million.
Absolutely this IBM. In 1989, they owned the PC market. It was theirs. Of course the cracks were deep and deepening, but IBM still could have maintained a leadership of that industry to this day. Instead, they squeezed so hard the PC market fell from their iron grip.
The fact IBM still exists and is an important company is irrelevant. They lost control of the de facto computing standard. Microsoft could lose control as well.
Maybe, but the markets also shift. Companies evolve. Old products fade out of importance and new goods and services appear. Their company value has never been higher.
I'm not sure I would have liked a world where IBM continued to control so much - we probably would have a much smaller open ecosystem.
I mean, the stuff I was hearing about Microsoft over a decade ago was that they were giving up on the OS and moving everything to a cloud based SaaS model. Basically, focusing energy where the money is.
If you are at JPMorgan or aerospace today using quantum computing, there is a very good chance you are using an IBM Heron 156 qubit scalable computer. They have been pushing quantum computers into very large companies for quite awhile now.
Google is strictly in research mode, but doing a lot of good, hard work.
> In which space? Desktop and high performance servers? Why would it?
Laptops. Apple already owned the high margin laptop market before they switched to ARM. With phones, tablets, laptops above 1k, and all the other doodads all running ARM, it's not that x86 will simply disappear. Of course not. But the investments simply aren't comparable anymore with ARM being an order of magnitude more common. x86 is very slowly losing steam, with their chips generally behind in terms of performance per watt. And it's not because of any specific problem or mistake. It's just that it no longer makes economic sense.
Small-scale user programmable portable radios does not convey what Flipper Zero does.
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