I don’t advise or go near “freemium” models. I don’t believe they’re necessarily bad for an investor, they just seem to me to work on “the greater fool theory.”
VC’s like them because if they can flip them, then they’re a successful business model – for them.
I’m a bit old fashioned and think that’s like flipping houses that are appreciating daily. We all know how that ends up.
Customer Development is a divide by zero problem for these companies and the process is not useful.

steve

steve

Rocket Science seems like they were just another group of people to founder on the rocks of injecting “Hollywood” sensibilities and story driven entertainment into video games. Seems that you were just some of the most visible of a long line of people and companies to see the game industry from the outside and fundamentally misunderstand why people play games.

I’m in the game industry and from what I’ve seen the entire idea of customer discover and development feels like a poor replacement for actually being a gamer yourself and trying to dissect and understand what you like about games and project that into your products. I haven’t really seen (first hand) any other formula that’s worked well.

That is, however, just my experience, and others have had success with other approaches.

It all makes me wonder if the game biz is really its own kind of beast when it comes to this stuff.

Rocket Science seems to be a bit of an extreme case though. Hype before shipping any product is an obvious flaw, but what about hyping products that have shipped but have zero business model? There are usually hopes of making it up on advertising, digital goods, transactions, consulting, but until the numbers are proven this is just as speculative.

I do not want to necessarily start a flame war about particular creations of “Web 2.0 era”, but really interested in your take on these “free” models through the prism of Customer Development.