May 25, 2008
Recommended Reading: Microsoft Still Not Getting It
Chris Kohler of Wired’s Game|Life blog writes about Microsoft’s recent announcement that they’ll be cutting less popular games from their Xbox Live Arcade lineup. Kohler does a pretty good job of explaining how ridiculous this move is, given the nature of digital distribution; Microsoft is doing pretty much the opposite of what they should be doing, according to the logic of long tail economics.
Old media has had this problem for a while now. They just don’t understand the internet. They still operate under that old broadcasting paradigm that, if it isn’t popular, then it needs to go. What they forget is that broadcasting dealt with two issues of unavoidable scarcity–broadcasting/cable carrier bandwidth and the fact that there’s only 24 hours a day. Neither is a concern in internet VoD, which academics have talked about for a decade or so. You’d think they’d have a clue by now, but hey…there’s still a lot of people who don’t know about HDTV yet too. I guess it is inevitable that the scions of industry are going to be just as clueless as the public they have tried to manipulate for eons.