Dartanion7

Sure, but I'm talking more about people that live in eg. Jersey Village, Champions, the Woodlands, Sugarland, etc. -- either they drive into the entertainment districts (because cabs won't come get them / drop them off) or they go to their local bars by car (because there are no cabs out there). I don't know if Uber will change this.

I agree with this for the most part; another problem is the vast distances (30+ minutes) many people travel to and from the entertainment districts. Very few people live within a 10-minute drive of, say, Washington Street, so taking a cab is prohibitively expensive (and cabs don't like taking people on 30+ minute rides to suburbia as the ride back is not monetizable). I'm not sure if Uber can create a new market here, because Uber drivers would face the same issues (long, non-monetizable trips to pick up / drop off riders).

Would you say that Tunisia is safer than Morocco? I visited Morocco a few years back and loved it; I wanted to extend my trip to Tunisia, but I was told by a few people that I wouldn't be as safe there as the larger cities aren't as focused on tourism as, say, Marakesch, Tangier, etc.

My guess as to the grey / blackhat tactics they used to gain initial traction were: 1) Fake "sell-side" accounts to provide marketplace liquidity 2) Manipulating app store chart ranking through bot downloads or download services to acquire "buy-side" accounts

It sounds like the service basically stopped growing once they had to abandon the black hat techniques they were using (possibly because they grew large enough to attract scrutiny from the platform operators). If that's the case, there was never a business.

I think the people doing the 2-year-hop are the ones with a lot of inbound interest. The last two jobs I've had (including my current job) came to me through a direct inquiry from someone at the company (not a recruiter / headhunter). The thing with consistent inbound interest is that it creates zero incentive for putting up with non-regular advancement / promotion (except the 'devil you don't know' risk, but that can be ameliorated by asking around. It's not hard to avoid a completely blind scenario) because the perception of "job hopping" becomes irrelevant. I suppose at some point the inbound interest might taper off but until it does, it's almost irresponsible to ignore better offers.

The model is not statistically sound. An R squared of < 50% implies very little explanation of variance.

This is verifiably not the case; for example, see the positive reviews of Candy Crush Saga and any number of other F2P titles. It's pretty clear that consumers prefer the freemium model, it's just a vocal minority that continues to single out specific games (like the one in the OP) and use them to denigrate the business model.

Also, isn't your argument re: information asymmetry an argument in favor of F2P? In the case where a developer has made a great game, it behooves them to release it for free, not only because that's obviously what consumers prefer (see the App Store), but because it allows the app to be more widely distributed and critiqued (and thus the worst apps would be quickly identified as bad and not downloaded -- perfect information).

This is absolutely insane. Why not out Fredo publicly?

> If freemium were generally just a demo for a better game

It's not, and no one ever said it was. The demo analogy isn't valid; a free-to-play game is a fully functional game. IAPs may unlock additional functionality, or help bypass time gates, or whatever, but the "core loop" of a game shouldn't (under the guise of freemium, anyway) be restricted by payments.

This isn't to say that it doesn't happen -- not every developer really understands freemium, and some bastardize it. But can you really argue with consumer preference for freemium? If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.

I recently wrote a book about Freemium, in part, because I think it is vilified unfairly within the context of gaming.

Before moving to gaming, I worked at Skype. No one ever accused Skype of exploiting people, or of facilitating addiction, or of polluting the purity of telephony. Skype made money by, essentially, up-selling people to paid phone calls. Those phone calls might have been to people's sick parents in foreign countries, or their kids. Imagine that! By charging for phone calls, Skype might have been prevented someone from speaking to their sick mother!

Freemium is a business model; it's not a moral framework or an ethos. Some people make terrible games with the freemium model; they likely would have made terrible games had they gone with an upfront payment model. The difference between the terrible freemium game and the terrible paid game is that people got to choose whether or not they contributed money to the terrible freemium version after playing it. They got more information before making a purchase, kind of like a test drive. Isn't that a good thing -- more information?

I don't agree with this, because even if you determine the generalist to be less efficient than a specialist for a given task, you still have to hire the specialist for that position, which takes time. So unless the generalist is simply incompetent -- which is a separate issue -- firing someone for being a "generalist" (which is kind of a meaningless term, anyway) in order to hire a specialist wouldn't make more sense than simply training up the generalist short of a flood of specialist applicants that could start fairly immediately.