this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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Gaming

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

All these companies that are suddenly having layoffs and/or enshittifying everything at once all shared the same basic business model (pardon the Bronze Age meme format from Slashdot...):

  • Give goods or services away for free
  • Attract customers on the basis of getting goods or services for free
  • ???
  • Profit!

Years of basically free debt service and stupid VC money let them kick the can down the road for a long time in terms of figuring out what Step 3 was gonna be, up to the point that many such services didn't even bother, replacing both Steps 3 and 4 with "Sell to whichever FAANG is sucker enough to think they can leverage our userbase for their own product." High interest rates have suddenly put a stop to the money party, though, and now they're all scrambling to find ways of aggressively monetizing their services.