Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: business

Democracy 4 DLC now available to add to wishlist!

All the cool kids these days are trying to get people to add their upcoming games to their wishlist. Its literally the coolest game in town. You wouldn’t want to not be cool right?

In all seriousness, the reason indie devs do all that is because its widely believed that steams algorithm internally keeps track of what new games are ‘hot’ by how many people are following them or adding them to their wishlists, and this helps to determine how much visibility those games get at launch. I suspect the effect is much reduced with DLC because it sells to a smaller audience anyway, and perhaps steam prioritizes new IP over expansions and DLC anyway. We have no way of knowing.

But you DO get notified by steam when a pre-release game you wishlist has been released, so if nothing else, its just a handy reminder to people that they were interested in X a while back, and its out now…

So here is the store page for the new expansion so you can do this right now:

This DLC has actually been really hard to make, and in many ways was tons harder than doing the voting systems expansion. I can imagine many people might think it is the other way around, given that the voting systems DLC added some new core functionality to the base game whereas this expansion ‘is just a few new countries’. There are two reasons why this was not the case…

Firstly its SIX new countries, which was a bit silly of me. It should have been 4 max. I had totally blanked out that part of my memory where we did all the research and balancing for all the countries in the base game, and also forgotten that many of the base game countries had been modelled before, so we already had a lot of the data. Secondly, I massively forgot how much research is needed to do a proper job of just ONE country. The game has all of its usual policies, plus a bunch of new ones, plus all the content that used to be in 3 expansion packs for D3, plus some new stuff that is specific to the previous expansion pack on voting systems.

Because no economic/political model can EVER really model the reality of a single country in all possible states, let alone model 10, and certainly not 16, there are bound to be a bunch of weird anomalies and inaccuracies in any new countries that get added to the game. Perhaps its REALLY easy if you play Poland as a super-religious libertarian who loves carbon taxes? Maybe Greece is unwinnable for people who want to play Environmentalist-Capitalists if you start with a global economic boom? The problem is…there are too many permutations to test.

I did actually code some AI that plays the game automatically, but the trouble is in extracting any useful data from it. The game does a lot of processing, and even if I get each turn down to under a second (I can get it below 2 seconds already, and thats without multithreading), that means a 5 year term with 5 terms is around 2 minutes of AI-modelling. This might sound quick, but if I can only do 30 playthroughs an hour (720 a day) then thats nowhere close to the number of playthroughs needed to accurately build up a statistical model of imbalance…

I’m not saying that I will not revisit that experiment later…just that the sheer number of combinations of decision in the game mean you really need several million games to be played and analyzed to detect any issues. In other words several years of dedicated processing…

Anyway… I do have a bunch of time set aside between now and release which is basically just me playing each country a LOT, and tweaking all the numbers so they are playable. Democracy 4 is more of a sandbox than a conventional game, so I’m not aiming to get every permutation perfectly balanced anyway. Thats an impossible dream. I do have to ensure nothing crashes or goes super weird in a normal playthrough on each of these six countries though…

That brings me to the price. I’ve set it at $9.99. I did a lot of agonizing about this, and talked to some fellow devs a lot about pricing. Both urged me to price it higher than this. One urged me to double that. Its a really difficult thing to get right, and a decision that I find really interesting.

We all know that the marginal cost of each copy is zero, so in a way, it doesn’t matter if I charge $0.01 or $100, its just a matter of picking the number that maximizes total revenue. This depends a lot on who I think the target market is, what they can afford, and how much value I think the DLC represents… All very difficult things to be exact on. Eventually I figured that given that the base game is $26.99 and has 10 countries….6 countries for $9.99 is a good deal. Its also worth considering that anybody even considering buying some DLC clearly already likes the base game, and has played it enough that they want some extra content. That implies that their play hours are high enough that their cost-per-hour for Democracy 4 is low, and thus are willing to consider any new content favorably with regards to expected play time.

I see this a lot in my daily multiplayer Battlefield V games with friends. I am a serious Battlefield V addict. I have over 1,200 hours in BFV and thousand more in the earlier games. My cost per hour for BFV is about £0.05. Thats insane for something I enjoy that much. Its like going to see a new Hollywood movie and paying £0.15 for it. Madness.

The irony is, that as your perceived playtime cost per hour falls, the value proposition of new content shoots up. If they added one new map to Battlefield V, thats maybe a 5% playtime bonus for me, or 60 hours of entertainment. Even if I will only pay £0.50 an hour, that map should be a good deal to me for £30. A 3-map pack should be £99.

Obviously not all Battlefield players are so obsessed, but with DLC *you are selling to the hardcore*, so the value proposition is way better than it seems to the casual player. This is why it makes sense in F2P games to have some really expensive stuff. There are definitely people who will not only buy a lot of it, but they will consider it a good deal. Thats assuming you aren’t tricking/exploiting people with dark patterns and other horrible business practices obviously…

So…Yup, this DLC will be $9.99 and I think its actually a pretty good deal for people who have played at least all of the maps in the base game once. Its also probably an attractive proposition for anybody who is actually living in one of those six new countries (Ireland, Poland, Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil and Greece). I guess I’ll find out if people agree with me on that in about a months time :D

Officially announcing the next Democracy 4 expansion

In the old days, I used to send press releases to news websites etc…and maybe I’ll still do that once I’m testing this and have some screenshots to show. Not that screenshots of Democracy 4 are exactly a visual feast that makes people’s jaws drop as they gasp at the photorealism…but there ya go.

There is to be another expansion pack for my latest game Democracy 4. It will be a straight data-only expansion, which will add six new countries to the game. Those countries are:

  • Greece
  • Ireland
  • Poland
  • Turkey
  • Switzerland
  • Brazil

I think this represents a pretty good mixture. Greece and Ireland are fairly similar to some of the other countries in the game, but we have a fair bunch of players in those countries and people like to play their home country. Plus Ireland is a bit interesting because it is basically an economic disaster due to geography, which is able to work mostly because it has ludicrously good rates for companies to base their HQ there for tax purposes. Its basically the largest respectable country that serves as a tax haven.

Brazil is obviously interesting because of its size, and its rainforest, and its status as a relatively poor country with relation to the existing game countries. Switzerland has its own unique properties, such as being super mountainous, fanatically neutral in diplomatic terms, and its hyper-democratized system of voting. Its also famous for nuclear shelters everywhere and a high level of gun ownership, but low gun crime.

Turkey is a fascinating country, as it sits between two continents and has influences from both. There are obviously some unusual positions regarding democracy and religion there, that are not really explored in the existing countries.

Poland is also interesting, sitting between western Europe and Russia, one of the last green countries in terms of energy use, and a country very nervous (with good reason) about its borders.

Its going to be hard to really capture the flavor of all these different countries, and I expect at least one major post-release revision as I collate feedback from players. It should be interesting though, and hopefully widen the appeal of the game a bit.

I don’t have a final release date yet, or pricing, but here is the status of the current todo list:

  • Initial statistics for each country 100% DONE
  • Country descriptions 100% DONE
  • Map icon and flag icons 100% DONE
  • Initial policy positions: 55% DONE
  • Extra dilemmas TODO
  • Extra Events TODO
  • Extra Situations TODO
  • Country specific simulation overrides TODO
  • Translation of all text into all languages TODO
  • Testing TODO

…so still lots to do…

In unrelated news, I got covid, and omg it was horrible. I basically suffered badly for a week, but am feeling much better. I have also been avoiding social media, which I increasingly view as a mistake, a dumpster fire which anybody who values their sanity should run screaming from. I might use it in future only as a way of linking to my blog.

In even less related news, I finally moved positech’s entire online presence away from a dedicated physical server (a hangover from days long gone when I had a lot of direct traffic, and hosted forums on the server, as well as a site dedicated to indiegames), and to a simple VPS. Like any hosting company, I was recommended a server package that was stupidly overspecced for my needs, but politely declined that. As a result I managed to cut my hosting bill by more than 50% which is very welcome.

There is still the ongoing saga of the solar farm BTW. Its not abandoned, we are still hoping to get it done, but its going to be at least another 3 months of bureaucracy (don’t get me started on this…) plus a likely extra year of waiting for a grid connection even if we get it. If there is ever anything to report, I’ll blog about it…

What income can you get from your old indie PC games?

There are a whole lot of different strategies for running a pc games business. I know people trying a bunch of different strategies and here are a few:

  • Publisher-funding model. Get publishing deals, and charge enough for the development milestones that you make a profit regardless of whether the final game makes a profit or not.
  • Patron model. Using patreon, or kickstarter or other methods, build up a loyal fanbase that pays you money to make games, regardless of whether they play them, or buy them in any quantity.
  • Straight sales model. Self-fund games, release them to the world as self published titles and hope the royalties exceed the development costs on a continual basis.
  • The big hit model. Go all-in, on a big title you bet your entire financial resources on, including remortgaging house/car etc. Assume that scale brings its own bonuses, and that the huge payoff outweighs the risk.
  • The continual release model. Release multiple games each year, maybe one a month, hoping that over time, the long tail builds up a relatively stable income.
  • The searching-for-a-hit model. Similar to continual release, but in this case the aim is to hope to strike it big with a sudden hit. Always be poised to drop everything and ramp up any game that gains initial traction.

Unless you didn’t already know, my method is the straight sale model. I’m pretty conventional in that I think the model where you just make the best games you feel comfortable with, from a risk POV, and aim to have them sell enough to result in a profit… is the most ‘normal’ and sensible way to do things. This plays to my strengths, because I’m not scared of risk, but not nuts, and also not a people-person as you need to be with patreons etc, and as a self-code-engine guy, I’m not churning out quick asset flips hoping for a hit.

However…

Because of the sheer bloody-minded determination to stick around, it turns out I have been making commercial aimed games since 1997, and therefore I have ended up with a big bunch of older titles that still run on most PCs, and can still generate revenue. have I perhaps become the ‘long-tail-indie’ just out of sheer hanging around? Could it be that actually positech games is self-sustaining on the basis of really old games, that although they do not sell much each, combined they add up to a tidy sum?

I’ll be honest, I have no idea how much those older games make without digging into the data, but I thought either way it might be interesting, so here goes.

Kudos 2 (2008)

This was the first game I made that made proper ‘omgz’ money. I got a cheqck one month for $20,000 and it was on the basis of that game, selling on about 15 different casual games portals. This was amazing. It was however, a long time ago now… 2008 apparently. This was certainly not my first game, mobygames catalogs a bunch of earlier ones, but it was the first one to make enough money that its worth even looking at the numbers.

Kudos 2 is unusual in that its not on steam. I also actually made it free on itch last year, but people tend to follow old buy links, and I still sell copies through BMT micro. Lets look at the last 365 days income from Kudos 2 for BMTMicro:

269 copies for a total of $1,463.69

Not bad, but this is pretty much the only income for the game. I accept donations on itch for it, and earned another $49

Gratuitous Space Battles (2009)

I always think of this as the game that was released on steam the day I moved house. That was a stressful day. Anyway… its old now (2009), and its on steam, and sold through BMT Micro, and also sold through apple on various devices. Lets check the last 365 days data:

Steam net income: ~$8,700 Apple sales: $0 BMT sales: ~$120

I actually forgot that apple sales were zero now because apple decided anybody who wanted to play 32bit games on devices they bought and paid for could go fuck themselves and revoked that ability, so there you go. Just one of many reasons I despise the company. But anyway… its about nine thousand dollars in the last year. Which for a game released 13 years ago is… pretty amazing?

Gratuitous Tank Battles (2011)

This is a game I often consider a flop, but its not really because it made a decent return at the time. However, its a game I have kind of forgotten about, after I made a single expansion pack. Its now 11 years old, so how is it doing?

Steam net income ~$550 BMT sales: ~$14

Whoah what the hell? Are those number correct? Yes they are! pretty bad. But why? I think its because the total peak sales of Gratuitous Tank Battles never managed to hit a real escape velocity. When it comes to long-tails for games, I get the impression that there are basically two scenarios:

The ‘Meh’ game.

This sort of game sells some copies, and maybe makes a profit, but it never really ‘takes off’. You don’t see dozens of youtubers covering it, there are not more reviews on websites than you can count. The community for the game never really gets going. Its not a watercooler discussion topic. People see its released…some buy it. And then its over. Gone. Done. The end.

The ‘Hit’ Game.

This doesn’t have to be Minecraft. It can just be a game that hit a certain threshold. I don’t know what that threshold is, but my best guess is $1-1.5million gross sales on steam. Once you hit that sort of level, you have a ‘community’. There are people posting online about the game every day. People who ask questions get community answers. People make mods, and the game thus expands. There is justification for DLC, which leads to more news, more coverage and more players, and you get a flywheel effect.

GSB and Kudos 2 hit the ‘hit game’ level. Kudos 2 is now so old its become irrelevant, but amazingly GSB still sells a non trivial number of units each year, and makes comfortably more than beer or coffee money.

Conclusion?

I think a lot of developers get frustrated that they are constantly in a grind, always having to desperately work on a new game to hopefully release it in time to survive the drop in royalties from the last one. Residual income from old games is almost zero, so you are constantly working away like a developer on a production line, never getting to relax.

I suspect many of these developers are at 90% between ‘meh’ and hit, but the problem is, being 90% of the way is not enough. Its pushing really hard on that flywheel, and feeling absolutely despondent, because you simply cannot see that point in the future where the momentum takes over. Its very, very easy to think things will never change, and that extra effort on a ‘failed’ game is simply not worth it. I totally understand why people do not push things that extra mile, when it feels like you have been pushing for the last 99 miles and got nowhere.

FWIW I think this applies to almost all endeavors, but especially creative ones that require popularity. I used to be in struggling heavy rock bands, and the constant putting up of posters and handing out of flyers for gigs, in the seemingly futile, pointless effort to get a few people to show up is soul-crushing and demotivating.

But in a sense, that explains why so many fail. Only dumb optimism or sheer bloodyminded obsession with success can possibly explain why some people still go out every single night and stick up those posters or give out those flyers, or keep tweeting and blogging about their video game. It always looks hopeless, totally and utterly futile, and impossible odds, and never gets you anywhere…until it does.

For the love of god… PLEASE use your own product

There was a bit of scandal recently involving Elon Musk’s potential purchase of twitter, where it became apparent that a number of people on twitters board of directors, never used twitter, or did not even have an account. In people’s mad rush to find a way to criticize Elon musk for everything, this was defended as being perfectly ok.

Its not ok. In fact is absolutely stupendously fucking stupid.

Now obviously, with certain hipster silicon valley companies, fueled by an endless supply of dumb-money venture capital from coked -up idiots who got lucky once with uber, and think they rule the universe, the idea of making a profit, or even having a decent product is seen as passé, but back in the real world where people live and work, if you run a business, its in your interests to make a decent product. This is business 101. In fact this is kindergarten level business. And yet… this seems to be a radical idea to most people.

It is absolutely ESSENTIAL that everyone involved at any level of making a product, has used that product a LOT. You need to know how it feels when that product fails, or works poorly, or slowly, or gives unexpected results. If you make videogames, you need to play your game a LOT. You cannot simply rely on someone else to filter all the data. You cannot understand what makes your product suck, or seem uncompetitive, just by looking at a spreadsheet. You do not really know WHY people buy your product. Maybe there is some regulatory capture that gives you an unfair advantage. Maybe they just haven’t heard of the rival products yet. Maybe they got your product cheap, so are making-do with it until they can afford the better product. maybe it was a gift.

Anybody who just used twitter for 30 minutes a day can tell you its swamped with hatred, anger, arguments, abuse, impersonation, trolls, scams, spam, bots trying to manipulate the news and much more. Anybody who has ever set their timeline to ‘recent’ and seen twitter secretly swapping it back to their algorithm without you asking, KNOWS its horrendously awful UX. But of course if none of the people in charge ever use it…what do they care?

It seems on a day-to-day basis I am increasingly coming into contact with businesses that have no idea how frustrating their product is to use, how impossible to navigate their processes are, and how absolutely infuriating it is to contact anybody. Do we honestly think any call-waiting queueing system would exist for one second if the chief executive was forced to communicate with his own team through the external-facing phone-bank?

This sort of thing drives me absolutely insane, but its also why I have a successful business, and multiple million-dollar selling games, over a 25 year period. Its actually *really easy* to do well in any business. You just make a decent product, work hard, listen to customer feedback AND try your own product and keep refining until you and they are happy with it. It sounds too easy to be true, but the reality is 99% of people are not working this way at all.

An additional; problem, which confounds this lack of experience with their own product/service, is that people at the top in most businesses make it absolutely impossible to contact them. Look up any big company such as apple, google, facebook, reddit, twitter. Show me the way of guaranteed contacting a human being at one of those companies in the next 15 minutes. Impossible.

Every barrier between you and your customers is another step you are laying on the path to failure and bankruptcy. Companies who totally blank their customers and consider them to be peasants, not worth talking to, are companies who have absolutely no clue what their customers actually want.

Do customers really want an 8k TV? No, but people are making them. Does anybody really want the metaverse? No, but its getting invested in. Does anybody really want to sign up to 8 different streaming services? No, but here comes another few… Does anybody really want to remove the headphone socket on a phone? no, but there it goes… again and again and again.

Sometimes a companies management isolation is so laughably bad, it can go years, maybe even a decade without realizing it has no idea what its doing any more. Adobe probably think people REALLY like having to subscribe to a monthly service just to edit some graphics files. Whoever runs CBS probably thinks people are really excited to sign up for their streaming service. Microsoft seem to think we are excited to know exactly what random redesign the windows taskbar and explorer gets next year. These companies are all absolutely delusional.

So my top tip, if you run a company: make it REALLY easy for people to talk to the management, Even the CEO, even you. You will not get anywhere near as much email as you think you will, and the best thing is you hear about (and fix) problems immediately, not after sales drop for 3 consecutive quarters and none of the geeks in the accounting team understands why. Video game players are notoriously argumentative, aggressive, passionate and prone to outbursts, and yet my email address (cliff at positech dot co dot uk) is all over the web, all over the place, and it all goes to me, totally unfiltered.

I’ve sold 3 million games on steam alone. Today so far (midday) I got 2 emails. What are people so afraid of?

The eventual erosion of the middlemen

Recently I had to communicate with a landowner about a potential site to build a solar farm, because yes, thats what I do some times. Because the discussion might involve some technical aspects I am not aware of, I went through the company I have a relationship with to build these things. However, on the other side of the negotiation, the landowner also went through a third party. A land agent.

Many of you have experienced this if you try to move house, and buy a new property. You want to sell your old house, and buy a new one. But you need to talk to an estate agent (or realtor in the US?) to communicate with the people you are selling your old house to, and talk to a second estate agent to buy the house you want. They are also talking to a third middleman to buy their property…

The problems here are massive, not least the fact that all of these people expect some percentage of the cost, but they also are SLOW, because frankly, they are quite happy where they live. Whats the hurry? And also their incentives are misaligned. An estate agent might take 1.2% of the sale price when they sell your home. You get the other 98.8%. If the house costs $300k, They can expect to make $3,600. If they can get a 5% better price by negotiating harder, they get $180 more. But you would get $15,000 more. Of course they don’t give anywhere close to a damn about you getting a good deal as you do…

Of course thats just when things are going ok, and the actual objectives are aligned. So you want to sell your house, and the estate agent has an incentive to sell it too. In theory, the estate agent is on your side. A bit. But a lot of the time, we deal with middlemen who are NOT on our side.

If you have ever bought a non-tesla car, you have probably gone to a ‘dealership’. There is a good reason that the slang term ‘stealership’ exists in the US. These are middlemen. Their job is not to help you buy a car, their job is to trick you into paying as much money as possible for whatever they want to sell you, and their loyalty is firmly to themselves. You may THINK you know what model car you want, but if they get better commission on another model, then they will say ANYTHING THEY LIKE to try and trick you into changing to that one.

And don’t for one minute think once you pick a car its over. They will then try to sell you add-ons, extras, extended warrantees and other crap. The last time my wife bought a (diesel) car, I remember having to warn the dealer that if he even mentioned a single more thing related to optional add-ons we didn’t ask for, we would walk out and abandon the deal. (she is more polite than me).

As you may know, the stupidly-fast-growing car company Tesla, has no dealerships. They have ‘showrooms’ where you can see the cars, but these are rare, the staff there do not push you to buy, and in fact if you decide you do want to buy, they will basically tell you to use the website. They also do not get commission. The cars have long waiting lists. I’ve been waiting for my new one since October, and its expected by the end of this year. A years wait to buy a car direct from the manufacturer…

Dealerships used to serve a purpose. Information. In 1970, if you wanted to buy a new ford, you would have to go to a showroom, and have the staff answer questions like ‘how fast does it go?’ ‘what colors are available’? and ‘how much luggage space is there?’

LOL.

Its 2022, and ever car company has a whizzbang website with videos, multiple images, and online configurators where you can see every possible permutation of how your ideal car would look. Every possible statistic is listed. You could also go to YouTube and watch any of the thousands of youtube channels about cars, where impartial real-world tests are carried out and you get to see exactly how each car handles each situation. You can now be ludicrously informed about a car before even leaving your sofa.The information gap between you and the car dealership has shrunk, maybe even reversed. I suspect I know more about the Tesla model Y (my next car) than most of their staff. They have to know about the whole range, whereas I can be laser focused on the car I want. The entire reason for car dealerships to exist is now gone.

The same is true for estate agents. The role of the estate agent is basically to show you what houses are for sale… and maneg the process of buying the one you want (or selling yours). There IS some hassle involving lawyers and mortgage providers here, but actually not very much. The vast majority of the time, estate agents are doing one of two things.

  • Showing you around a house
  • Playing telephone tag or email with buyers and sellers

The first of these is patronizing as hell. They open a door to the bathroom and say “this is the bathroom”. I know, I’ve seen one before. We even have one in our own house. Thanks buddy. There is an argument that they need to be there to keep an eye on you, sure, but the extent to which they need to facilitate viewings is now vastly lower than before.

Before we bought this house 12 years ago, we drove a LONG way here to look at lots of options. When we got there, it turned out one of them was right next to a sewage treatment building. The estate agent had not mentioned this, because they are bastards. These days, in 2022, we can all easily browse google street view, and check out dozens of photos, maybe even videos of any potential house and its surroundings before bothering to go ‘visit’ any which we can now tell are non-starters before we even get in the front door.

Again, information has destroyed the vast majority of the power of the middle-man/woman.

In my own file of computer games, this is also happening, but we are currently only half way there. The original business model was bricks-and-mortar stores, where you walk in, pick a video game from a shelf and buy it. That horribly exploitative model collapsed with the internet and buying online. For a few years, people tended toi sell online from their own website, paying very little commission. 5% would be considered a lot, as you are basically just paying credit card fees and chargeback/fraud protection, plus some absolutely trivial disk storage and bandwidth costs. This is still an option today, and you can buy Democracy 4 semi-direct from me, at 5% commission here:

Most people do not do this, because there are super-popular online stores now like Steam, Epic and GoG and Humble. In the mobile realm, this is totally controlled (many would say illegally) by apple and google. The middlemen who facilitate buying something from someone went from physical stores to online, but did not go away. The commission they take dropped from over 60% down to 30%, buts its still very much there.

I actually believe this may be changing. The EU and the US are both currently looking into legislation to combat monopoly practices by tech giants which no doubt include the idea that they can take 30% of every transaction. Personally I believe this is way overdue. The same forces that have started to crumble the car dealership module will eventually force their way into the online realm too.

Hit hard by digital sales, GameStop is looking to close up to 150 stores this year - The Verge

When I started selling video games online in 1997, one top tip people had was to put your phone number and address on your website (yikes). People would NEVER hand over their credit card over the interwebs, but they would feel much safer if they could use a telephone to speak to a human. People also HAD to have the option of having the product snail-mailed to them on a physical CD as a ‘backup’ in case your fly-by-night website went bust and they had no way to get the game again! For what its worth, My company has been selling online since 1997. Steam was announced in 2002, 5 years later., I’m still here.

Many of the ‘value-add features that game-store-middlemen provide have ben eroded over time. They provide the bandwidth to re-download the game! This costs virtually nothing these days, especially for smaller indie games. They provide an online message board for the games players! but so does reddit, facebook, and a billion other places. They provide hosting for trailers and videos about the game! But so does youtube…

There is definite *value* to customers in having a single place where they know they can find all this, but increasingly the actual ‘location’ of information on the internet is becoming moot. I no longer have to care what the web address of a specific site is (and I remember the days when we laboriously typed h t t p : // on front of every address…). Since virtual assistants became a thing, I can now just yell ALEXA, READ ME REVIEWS OF GAME X, and it can do it. Are those reviews from site X or Y? I don’t care.

Its an interesting time to be in selling games online. There was a brief period of stability where it was established, firmly, that games got sold through the apple store, the google play store, or through steam. That was it. But this may now be changing. Its likely changing in other industries too.

Middlemen need to be absolutely sure they are providing some value that is not just ‘information’. Information is everywhere, available to everyone, trivially, all the time. There is still value in curation, and convenience, but its eroding, and its probably not going to hold its value for much longer.