The cost of games

The Author’s Guild reported that the average U.S. full-time author “earned a median annual income from writing-related activities of $23,329 in 2022, of which an average of $12,000 was from their books.” (The median American worker brings home an estimated $54,132 a year.)

Now if that doesn’t scare you off, I don’t know what could.

And I regret sayin... See more

Gaming is a hits-driven business, where the biggest productions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need to find a way to recoup their sizable investments. As a result, the companies behind these massive games look for as many ways as possible to mitigate risk, either by copying popular trends (like the battle royale craze of the late 2010s) o... See more

The whole music industry is something like $20B. Compare it to video games, a $140B market, and you see the discrepancy. Fortnite alone makes $3B a year, and most of it is profit. Same with League of Legends — they make $2B a year, mainly selling virtual goods.

The marginal cost of writing code is dropping, while the marginal cost of running it—to the extent that much of this new code is frequently using inference, or doing other computationally-intensive tasks—is rising. That's the reverse of the economic tailwind that's done so much for software engineers' incomes and software investors' returns.