This image cannot be protected by copyright. Independent creators seem to prefer weaker intellectual property (IP) protections until it comes to AI. We can forgive a certain amount of hypocrisy here, since the original stance on IP probably wasn’t well considered, but it does make it hard to take these claims seriously. Saying “we should … Continue reading What are we trying to protect with IP?
Unity’s recent layoffs are the result of a shift in the company’s strategy. This strategy will mean fewer features and improvements to the engine than before, and, like the adjustments to the pricing change, it will favour large developers more. Unity has a product to sell, and that product has been fairly consistent throughout its … Continue reading The Unity We Asked For
Gamers are less willing to subsidize inefficiency in game production than they have been in the past. This is a product of independent gaming's success which has resulted in more developers being supported while simultaneously introducing more competition. This more competitive environment has been characterized through the discoverability problem, where games struggle to get attention … Continue reading Discoverability as a Productivity Problem
We are better at statistics than we normally get credit for. Greater statistical literacy is still important, since more data is being used to persuade, but our overall understanding has gotten better. One example of this improvement is that most people reading analysis will know that the arithmetic mean can be shifted by excessively large … Continue reading Saving the mean
Gamestop's market capitalization (share price multiplied by number of shares, a measure of valuation for the company) exceeded $22 billion by the end of this week, up from the quarter of a billion it was valued at the same time last year. This $22 billion valuation is greater than the market capitalization of Kellogg's, the … Continue reading Untimely meditations on a mania
Economics has something of an edge when it comes to respectability among the social sciences, but it is often squandered by talking heads acting like everyone else is an idiot on TV. The benefit of taking an introductory economics class is not prestige or a set of talking points but rather a set of tools … Continue reading Store Wars: Imperfect views of imperfect markets
Cultist Simulator reveals its world through fragments and its lore is discovered by considering these fragments in relation to each other. The game's Discord server has an active community that discusses the lore of the world (now known as the Secret Histories), and there is plenty of room for interpretation about what is going on. … Continue reading The Networks of Cultist Simulator
The most perplexing feature of the commentary surrounding the Epic Games Store (EGS) is that the loudest voices assign criticism to Epic that is more appropriately targeted at Valve. The criticism that has gotten the most attention is the one that says Epic is using its timed exclusives in order to take over digital distribution, … Continue reading Epic’s Tactics Are The System Working As Intended
While it is hard to think of an econometrics book being popular in any traditional sense of the term, the best candidate for a popular econometrics textbook is Josh Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke's Mostly Harmless Econometrics (MHE). The title is a deliberate reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and communicates the irreverent tone taken in … Continue reading What’s in a Name: The Case of ‘Metrics
SystemTalk 