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Agent Steel

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  • Mar 01, 2012 @ 12:31pm

    Re:

    Netflix. Steam. Itunes. Hulu. Napster. All successful businesses that offer a far greater degree of convenience. You think the movie industry somehow has an entitlement to billion dollar profits? It doesn't. It's going to have to settle for a lower expenditure, lower profit model just like any other firm in any other industry has to do to keep up with the times.

    When a high grossing movie like El Mariachi can be made on a budget of $7000, I have absolutely no sympathy for Hollywood when they stuff their movies to the brim with CGI/3D at great cost whilst employing banal cookie cuter writing and then wonder why they can't make a profit equal to their expenditure.

    Music industries are even worse, because most of the cost of a CD comes from the label's desire to make a disproportionate return on sales. If you eliminate the CD medium and offer a straight download fee of, say 0.99$(like iTunes), you'll simultaneously eliminate the cost of the CD medium for the distributor and make the product much easier to procure legally. The industry will spend sums to the tune of $1000000 on making a single pop song. You can make an entire CD for less than a 20th of that amount, and that's WITH advertising, distribution, and licensing. Once again, pitching an overpriced product to a saturated market is a recipe for disaster, and once again the RIAA is dooming itself by running its high cost model in an industry that is moving towards low cost.

    As for Steam, I shouldn't have to convince you of its success. It's making billions of dollars and indie devs are popping up like wildfire on it. More and more major companies are moving their PC ports to it, and the latest Bethesda release successfully used it as an alternative to DRM.

    So there are plenty of ways that the existing industries can improve their model to adapt to the market. You have to be grievously misinformed to honestly think that art should optimally be produced by outdated billion dollar conglomerates that would charge people by the minute for sunlight if they could.