That's sort of the point of survivorship bias. Name one unsuccessful would-be entrepreneur. It's hard because chances are, anyone that's recognizable was successful in some way.
For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.
Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.
Secondly, these sorts of discussions usually don't define any concrete amount of success that a game is supposed to achieve. What is "no traction" supposed to mean? Aegis Defenders has 1,656 reviews at the moment. There's the assumption floating about that you can roughly multiply this by 50 to get the number of owners, which would turn out to about 80,000. The price point is fluctuating between $19.99 and $4.99. Will it net the developer/publisher less money over its lifetime than its development cost?
In any case, I think that one of the biggest factors is not merely the game's quality, but whether there are a lot of players hungry for a game's specific concept and genre. Making an "excellent game" in an oversaturated genre, or in a genre where games require some network effect to take off (any multiplayer game), is much more risky. Don't just make something good; make something that a lot of people want even when the product is less than perfect.
EDIT: VG Insights estimates $770k gross revenue. That's just for the Steam version. The game was also published on PlayStation 4 and Switch. The developer team seems to have been small.
Based on your reply to the sibling comment, you're just pointing out the "contrast" to the success of Balatro? I honestly don't get the point. I don't think the particular amount of success that break-out hits achieve matters to the discussion. If Balatro had a million reviews, would you expect Aegis Defenders to also have a lot more reviews and sales? I think this isn't relevant to the question whether excellent games will succeed (for me this means: enable the developers to make a good living) with some predictability or whether it's due to luck, and whether there exist a lot of excellent but unknown games.
>Then it seems that "survivorship bias" is some kind of unfalsifiable and self-fulfilling belief.
It's very falsifiable. Just not by us, as we have no acccess to the sales data, nor enough public sales points to make a proper statistical analysis. The best ones out there are either based on estimations (especially reviews to sales ratios) or non-public data you pay the NPD or someone similar thousands to access (and obviously you're not allowed to share that data). So someone truly curious can pay a lot of money to get an answer.
Based on the number of years it took to develop the game, it wouldn't be considered one that achieved "15 minutes of fame". 100 reviews is quite a far cry from your example of Balatro with 33k. I'm not sure where you plan to draw the line on "success", but I think this is a broadly reasonable contrast.
I own this game too, got it probably from a bundle-sale, so I didn't really bought it on purpose for the game itself. It also seems to haven been given away for free some years ago.
Playing devil's advocate: you can't block on native apps, and some mobile web browsers don't have extension support.
Also, please avoid ad-hominem ("hilariously limited intellect"); it overshadows what otherwise would be a valid point (enforcing a ban vs. practicing personal habit, critique on blanket statements, etc.)
The problem is that we don't (as far as I know) have the tools or knowledge on how to accurately assess the impact. So, the more conservative option of "don't mess with it" makes sense here, considering that other species' introductions to other ecosystems have been disastrous.
"Free" doesn't mean no restrictions. For example, apps/websites like Myspace and Facebook and anything that's been used to spread hate, cause bullying, or threats have always been a target of regulation, albeit never an outright ban.
In the case here, it's ostensibly being done with national security considerations in mind. What remains to be determined is whether or not these concerns are valid. But the idea that "free" means the government has no power to ban things, including apps, borders naïvety.
I think you totally missed the argument: it's not about copying anything China does, it's about reciprocating restrictions that they place on your country. If China places a tariff on US imported goods, then the US places a tariff on Chinese goods.
This is and has been the case even for non-adversary countries, and is bread-and-butter foreign policy
Reciprocating tariffs has been a thing for hundreds of years before the US even existed. The justification isn't "they're doing it, so let's just copy them", it's "they're inflicting economic impact on us by reducing the profit of our exports to them, we'll put pressure on them to stop that by reducing the amount that we import for them".
It's not simple "but he hit me first" logic: it's macroeconomics with an actual strategy in mind.
Your comment comes off as "people who score well on tests are more often cheaters", supported by anecdotal evidence. Above all, it's hardly relevant to the overall discussion and feels more like a grievance.
A student who has excess bandwidth after acing a test is more likely to want to poke and explore the limitations of that system than a student who, at capacity, is almost perfect.
Unscientific, but I'd bet there are two major cheating populations: 95%+, and something like 50-75%. By definition there are a lot more of the mid-tier-barely-getting-by cheaters, but they also aren't as smart and are only dangerous to societal trust in aggregate.
Come to think of it, I missed the third major population: pre-meds
In the situation you posit, that sort of action would come from a vote, not a single person's vigilante call for action. That is the difference.
While I'd argue for a normal person that posting something like that would just fly under the radar and disappear into the aether of the internet, the same does not apply to someone who heads a large publicly visible company, and who posts publicly on an account associated (implicitly) with that company.
That's a government person calling for an attack on another government. This is a citizen calling for an attack on a group of individuals, government-involved or not. It's not even remotely the same.
It's literally illegal to give death threats (not that I think this qualifies as a particularly serious one). But that's the difference between this and your argument with politicians rattling sabres. (Just to make it clear, I don't feel so strongly about the whole situation, but I do think making false equivalences is misleading)
1. Votes come at the end of a process starting with someone calling for action. Has to be a first person to bring the idea up; and Twitter is as good a place for public debate as we have. (If only people could master the longform paragraph, or even essay-length debate and move to somewhere a bit more nuanced.)
2. Reflecting on the "Die slow motherfuckers" for a little while - Tan didn't actually make a call for action. Exactly what that means is ambiguous, and it is without a doubt poor form.
> someone who heads a large publicly visible company
If the board wants to sack him I could certainly see that happening. Although as a practical matter, I don't think this is a sustainable standard. A good CEO is worth their weight in gold, sacking them over being a Twitter troll from time to time seems like a bad call. Musk is an example; both a troll and also a pretty amazing CEO. The right thing to do might be to tolerate the situation unless the pressure gets overwhelming.
On that point we've been tolerating outward displays of political speech from corporations for a while. I'm against it both on principle and because it is typically left-wing-aligned but since it happens I don't see why this sort of political diatribe is needs to be stepped on. Dude has political opinions. We all do.
To your last point, it might be more constructive to point out the specifics of why you are against corporate political speech as opposed to a somewhat-binary left/right of the political spectrum.
One benefit I see of it is normalizing the presence of historical out-groups (racial minorities, gender minorities, etc.) that have always existed in society.
But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin and the chasing of support from out-groups simply as a means to push profit margins is sometimes obvious and thinly-veiled enough to the point of growing discontent towards the groups that they're ostensibly supporting.
This sort of critique (even if I can't guarantee its accuracy) is a bit more nuanced and feels a little bit less cargo-culty than just left/right.
There exist people who see benefits of any political stances. That is why the stance is taken. Arguing about whether it is a benefit is at the core of politics. For example, Mr Tan probably sees benefit from certain SF supervisors resigning immediately and is frustrated that they don't.
But it is better to keep businesses out of that, I believe we're better off if they are relatively neutral and thoughtless engines to achieve highly specific goals.
> But, in practice, the "support" can be paper-thin ...
1) This situation is also paper thin. I'd bet money that Tan doesn't do anything that would cause the supervisors to die a slow death. Most attack on politicians are.
2) I've had it made quite clear to me in companies I've worked at that if there was a candidate with different skin colour or gender to me they'd be before me in the line for hiring and promotions. That is paper thin support, but it is due to political ideology and I still don't like it. I would like companies to promote equal treatment and be scrupulously neutral on politics.
Are you implying that it's not a threat of any kind? Regardless of how it's enacted? I would certainly rather be threatened with a nice day.
Especially in this climate, where the tip of a hat causes anonymous people to pile on and send threats via mail, it wouldn't be as simple as brushing it off.
The worst part isn't usually the initial threat, it's the piling on afterwards that can last for months and years afterwards.
There's a real leap in the phrasing of "die slow" as "I do not approve of your policies and hope that others are elected to improve the city".
Simply passing that off as "bad wording" is reductive and gives leeway to others who test the waters with extremism and turtle back into the shell of "I didn't mean it that way" when they get pushback.
It's not that Garry literally means he wants them to die, it's that it's irresponsible for a leader to infer that idea and to normalize (unintentionally, as I would give him the benefit of the doubt here) the same type of actions as actual extremists.
For games, I'll give an example: Aegis Defenders. Great game, no traction.