Rise of Industry is a game about fungibility.
If there is anything a company hates more than employees speaking candidly it's their product becoming a commodity. Seems backward, but when a product becomes a commodity it stops being a companies product and becomes something anyone can make, like farts, or opinions.
The company is no longer special, which means the customer no longer needs exactly what that company is making, they could just go to anybody who is making the same thing and get the same experience, so the issue becomes about the price.
When the issue becomes about the price the whole market turns to shit cause business gotta keep undercutting each other to stay afloat. Gotta get to market faster, gotta tell better lies about what the product can do, gotta put the product on sale, gotta buy more ads and positive reviews, gotta manufacture more products so they can be in more places.
All this costs the company hella money to do, and the last thing any self-respecting multinational conglomerate wants to do is be spending extra money on diminishing returns like boo boo the fuckin' fool.
Only unique things can survive at a high price and low volume. Unique can be a bunch of things also, you can make the same products as everybody else but if a "crack" demo (a consumer group like teens that will literally sell a kidney to have what they see their peers using regardless of quality) is into it then conversation over, other companies, we the cool kids until the kids get bored or you make up a better lie.
People say the most valuable commodity is time, but in our hearts, we know the answer is actually people, but we don't say it aloud because that is rude and high-key slavey.
If unique products are the only products able to survive a high price, and unique people make those products, then time is beholden to the process of making the unique thing for the company. Innovation takes as long as it takes, monkeys in a room writing Shakespeare and all of that.
Who knows when phones are gonna innovate? Who knows when games are gonna innovate? What does innovation even look like? Smartphones as we know them started around twenty years ago and here we are, games as a service started around twenty years ago and here we are.
People love to send that "time, quality, cost, pick two." meme around like skype calls need more memes but I think people miss that the quality part also applies to the quality of experience of employees just as much as the quality of the product being created. Just thinking out loud.
The customer has more product in the market than they could ever need, they got entitled and indifferent. The business got drunk on hubris, thinking the pointy end of the graph can only go up, and the workers have all but given up on chucking water out the boat. Sinking ships ghost riding to port.
What's it all mean? I dunno. Treat people better and they will make cooler stuff, I spose.
Anyway, shouts to info, rip TB rip TC rip Tall-T. Love is prefabs, hate is also prefabs. Get out there and do great things, everything is impossible till you do it. We believe in you, so there is that, also Jobs.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Acerbity
