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Darren Lepke

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  • Dec 18, 2008 @ 08:12am

    Why Won't Anybody Think Of The Children!

    I agree that this is one of the more hysterical posts from Mike that I've seen. We're starting down the slippery slope of equating a dissimilar mindset or ignorance of the new realities of abundance with "hating mankind" or being "damaging".

    From a pragmatic standpoint, the folks at Sony are in the business of maximizing profit. Unless I don't understand the purpose of PlayStation Home (Is it an exercise in maximizing social harmony in a digital utopia?), it is likely that they are sticking with what works for now. As much as folks like us like to spitball new business models, the marketing folks at Sony are faced with the scarcity of time and engineering resources to make PSH work.

    Why would they remove a proven economic source of revenue? More profits = more resources to do cool things. Less profits = your project gets shut down and your hard work goes out the window.

    It is also likely that they haven't figured out a way to make money from the absence of scarce real estate in an online world. Hopefully they will start experimenting with different ways. In the meantime, why would you kill one of your golden geese?

    If the concern is "damaging resource limitations", I would be curious to see what kind of damage do you could expect. In-world riots? Cybercrime? I would argue that the cost/benefit analysis for Sony would lean in favor of more revenues via traditional scarcity models. They have created *artificial* scarcity in digital real estate. They can always add more later. That is the beauty of digital resources.

    D