zlacker

>>riidom+(OP)
This is the libertarian fantasy: just build the entire platform yourself and you don’t have to deal with the pesky decisions of other companies.

Yes, you have to choose your dependencies carefully, but where does it end? Steam could go away tomorrow. The game engine you license could go out of business. Your hosting provider, your DNS provider could kick you off.

If you don’t entertain new platforms, you are leaving money on the table. I’d wager that Japanese game manufacturers missed hundreds of millions of dollars by being late to embrace Steam.

>>jnwats+xf
Calling this article a "libertarian fantasy" seems unfair. The author does explicitly recommend entertaining new platforms, but being prepared with a backup plan for when these platforms are no longer viable for whatever reason.

Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough":

- A website on a domain you own - A mailing list - Own and license your Intellectual Property - Sell your merch on your site - Your own reputation

We can extend this logic to an unrealistic degree and do nothing but make your game/app/service completely agnostic to any platform in every way, but we can acknowledge that such perfection is unattainable without throwing out the value of being platform-agnostic in realistic ways.

>>allema+HF
> Where does it end? They call out these options as presumably being "safe enough":

Is there any data around why these are safer than the alternatives? Because the article is just a classic case of nerd philosophy; there's _no_ justification of the actual risks involves in these platforms aside from vague anecdotes and analogies, then using these vague anecdotes to drive recommendations.

>>Karrot+9T
I don't know, I think you can go ahead and use your best judgment on whether it's riskier for an indie game studio to go all-in on marketing through a social media juggernaut or trying to steer people to channels like a mailing list that they control. This is not a research paper.

I'm sure there's lots to criticize in "nerd philosophy" but an article that boils down to "avoid vendor lock-in" with a cute analogy is just a weird target to choose. If you can't help but read a certain ideological slant onto it and can't possibly understand it separate from that reading, I think that says more about you.