Many people seem to have a single bucket in their thinking, which merges “moral condemnation” and “negative product review”. This produces weird effects, like writing angry callout posts for a business having high prices.
I think a large fraction of libertarian thinking is just the abillity to keep these straight, so that the next thought after “business has high prices” is “shop elsewhere” rather than “coordinate punishment”.
Outside of politics, none are more certain that a substandard or overpriced product is a moral failing than gamers. You’d think EA were guilty of war crimes with the way people treat them for charging for DLC or whatever.
I’m very familiar with this issue; e.g. I regularly see Steam devs get hounded in forums and reviews whenever they dare increase their prices.
I wonder to which extent this frustration about prices comes from gamers being relatively young and international, and thus having much lower purchasing power? Though I suppose it could also be a subset of the more general issue that people hate paying for software.
I do not watch this topic closely, and have never played a game with a DLC. Speaking as an old gamer, it reminds me of the “shareware” concept, where companies e.g. released the first 10 levels of their game for free, and you could buy a full version that contained those 10 levels + 50 more levels. (In modern speech, that would make the remaining 50 levels a “DLC”, kind of.)
I also see some differences:
First, the original game is not free. So you kinda pay for a product, only to be told afterwards that to enjoy the full experience, you need to pay again. Do we have this kind of “you only figure out the full price gradually, after you have already paid a part” in other businesses, and how do their customers tolerate it?
Second, somehow the entire setup works differently; I can’t pinpoint it, but it feels obvious. In the days of shareware, the authors tried to make the experience of the free levels as great as possible, so that the customers would be motivated to pay for more of it. These days (but now I am speaking mostly about mobile games, that’s the only kind I play recently—so maybe it feels different there), the mechanism is more like: “the first three levels are nice, then the game gets shitty on purpose, and offers you to pay to make it playable again”. For the customer, this feels like extortion, rather than “it’s so great that I want more of it”. Also, the usual problems with extortion: by paying once you send a strong signal that you are the kind of a person who pays when extorted, so obviously the game will soon require you to pay again, even more this time. (So unlike “get 10 levels for free, then get an offer of 50 more levels for $20”, the dynamics is more like “get 20 levels, after level 10 get a surprise message that you need to pay $1 to play further, after level 13 get asked to pay $10, after level 16 get asked to pay $100, and after level 19 get asked to pay $1000 for the final level”.)
The situation with desktop games is not as bad as with mobile games, as far as I know, but I can imagine gamers overreacting in order to prevent a slippery slope that would get them into the same situation.
This might be a possible solution to the “supply-demand paradox”: sometimes things (e.g. concert or soccer tickets, new playstations) are sold at a price such that the demand far outweighs the supply. Standard economic theory predicts that the price would be increased in such cases.
I think that would depend on what the situation is; in the scenario of price increases, if the business is a monopoly or have very high market power, and the increase is significant (and may even potentially cause harm), then anger would make sense.
Just to push back a little—I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that’s an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it’s hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.
I agree that it is easy to automatically lump the two concepts together.
I think another important part of this is that there are limited methods for most consumers to coordinate against companies to lower their prices. There’s shopping elsewhere, leaving a bad review, or moral outrage. The last may have a chance of blowing up socially, such as becoming a boycott (but boycotts are often considered ineffective), or it may encourage the government to step in.
In our current environment, the government often operates as the coordination method to punish companies for behaving in ways that people don’t want. In a much more libertarian society we would want this replaced with other methods, so that consumers can make it harder to put themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma or stag hunt against each other.
If we had common organizations for more mild coordination than the state interfering, then I believe this would improve the default mentality because there would be more options.
This sounds very much like the phenomenon described in From Personal to Prison Gangs: Enforcing Prosocial Behavior, where the main reason for regulation/getting the government to step in has become more and more common is basically the fact that at scales larger than 150-300 people, we lose the ability to iterate games, which in the absence of acausal/logical/algorithmic decision theories like FDT and UDT, basically mean that the optimal outcome is to defect, so you can no longer assume cooperation/small sacrifices from people in general, and coordination in the modern world is a very taut constraint, so any solution has very high value.
(This also has a tie-in to decision theory: At the large scale, CDT predominates, but at the very small scale, something like FDT is incentivized through kin selection, though this is only relevant for 4-50 people scales at most, and the big reasons why algorithmic decision theories aren’t used by people very often is because of the original decision theories that were algorithmic like UDT basically required logical omniscience, which people obviously don’t have, and even the more practical algorithmic decision theories require both access to someone’s source code, and also the ability to simulate another agent either perfectly or at least very, very good simulations, which we again don’t have.)
This link is very helpful to illustrate the general phenomenon:
Many people seem to have a single bucket in their thinking, which merges “moral condemnation” and “negative product review”. This produces weird effects, like writing angry callout posts for a business having high prices.
I think a large fraction of libertarian thinking is just the abillity to keep these straight, so that the next thought after “business has high prices” is “shop elsewhere” rather than “coordinate punishment”.
Outside of politics, none are more certain that a substandard or overpriced product is a moral failing than gamers. You’d think EA were guilty of war crimes with the way people treat them for charging for DLC or whatever.
I’m very familiar with this issue; e.g. I regularly see Steam devs get hounded in forums and reviews whenever they dare increase their prices.
I wonder to which extent this frustration about prices comes from gamers being relatively young and international, and thus having much lower purchasing power? Though I suppose it could also be a subset of the more general issue that people hate paying for software.
I do not watch this topic closely, and have never played a game with a DLC. Speaking as an old gamer, it reminds me of the “shareware” concept, where companies e.g. released the first 10 levels of their game for free, and you could buy a full version that contained those 10 levels + 50 more levels. (In modern speech, that would make the remaining 50 levels a “DLC”, kind of.)
I also see some differences:
First, the original game is not free. So you kinda pay for a product, only to be told afterwards that to enjoy the full experience, you need to pay again. Do we have this kind of “you only figure out the full price gradually, after you have already paid a part” in other businesses, and how do their customers tolerate it?
Second, somehow the entire setup works differently; I can’t pinpoint it, but it feels obvious. In the days of shareware, the authors tried to make the experience of the free levels as great as possible, so that the customers would be motivated to pay for more of it. These days (but now I am speaking mostly about mobile games, that’s the only kind I play recently—so maybe it feels different there), the mechanism is more like: “the first three levels are nice, then the game gets shitty on purpose, and offers you to pay to make it playable again”. For the customer, this feels like extortion, rather than “it’s so great that I want more of it”. Also, the usual problems with extortion: by paying once you send a strong signal that you are the kind of a person who pays when extorted, so obviously the game will soon require you to pay again, even more this time. (So unlike “get 10 levels for free, then get an offer of 50 more levels for $20”, the dynamics is more like “get 20 levels, after level 10 get a surprise message that you need to pay $1 to play further, after level 13 get asked to pay $10, after level 16 get asked to pay $100, and after level 19 get asked to pay $1000 for the final level”.)
The situation with desktop games is not as bad as with mobile games, as far as I know, but I can imagine gamers overreacting in order to prevent a slippery slope that would get them into the same situation.
This might be a possible solution to the “supply-demand paradox”: sometimes things (e.g. concert or soccer tickets, new playstations) are sold at a price such that the demand far outweighs the supply. Standard economic theory predicts that the price would be increased in such cases.
I don’t think people who disagree with your political beliefs must be inherently irrational.
Can you think of real world scenarios in which “shop elsewhere” isn’t an option?
Based on the words from this post alone -
I think that would depend on what the situation is; in the scenario of price increases, if the business is a monopoly or have very high market power, and the increase is significant (and may even potentially cause harm), then anger would make sense.
Just to push back a little—I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that’s an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it’s hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.
I agree that it is easy to automatically lump the two concepts together.
I think another important part of this is that there are limited methods for most consumers to coordinate against companies to lower their prices. There’s shopping elsewhere, leaving a bad review, or moral outrage. The last may have a chance of blowing up socially, such as becoming a boycott (but boycotts are often considered ineffective), or it may encourage the government to step in. In our current environment, the government often operates as the coordination method to punish companies for behaving in ways that people don’t want. In a much more libertarian society we would want this replaced with other methods, so that consumers can make it harder to put themselves in a prisoner’s dilemma or stag hunt against each other.
If we had common organizations for more mild coordination than the state interfering, then I believe this would improve the default mentality because there would be more options.
This sounds very much like the phenomenon described in From Personal to Prison Gangs: Enforcing Prosocial Behavior, where the main reason for regulation/getting the government to step in has become more and more common is basically the fact that at scales larger than 150-300 people, we lose the ability to iterate games, which in the absence of acausal/logical/algorithmic decision theories like FDT and UDT, basically mean that the optimal outcome is to defect, so you can no longer assume cooperation/small sacrifices from people in general, and coordination in the modern world is a very taut constraint, so any solution has very high value.
(This also has a tie-in to decision theory: At the large scale, CDT predominates, but at the very small scale, something like FDT is incentivized through kin selection, though this is only relevant for 4-50 people scales at most, and the big reasons why algorithmic decision theories aren’t used by people very often is because of the original decision theories that were algorithmic like UDT basically required logical omniscience, which people obviously don’t have, and even the more practical algorithmic decision theories require both access to someone’s source code, and also the ability to simulate another agent either perfectly or at least very, very good simulations, which we again don’t have.)
This link is very helpful to illustrate the general phenomenon:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYt3ZCrBq2QAf3rak/from-personal-to-prison-gangs-enforcing-prosocial-behavior