I was having a conversation today about gaming markets and ports and such and got on a bit of a tear before deciding not to flood the discord with a rant, so now y'all get blessed with it instead.
There is this thing capitalism does a lot, that's kind of hard to describe, so to start let me tell you the story of Finnish Cheetos.
So there's an importer that brings over mostly US and British snacks and sodas, and they started selling American Cheetos in Finland. The regular ones, but especially the flaming hot and the jalapeno cheddar. And they sold like gangbusters. Started at one retailer in Helsinki, but soon they were popping up in multiple chains and even got on the shelves at one of the big national chains.
This was all unofficial though, but the success of it catches Frito-Lay's attention, and they're like "Oh, I guess we should start selling directly to the Finnish market".
So they have this big launch and suddenly Cheetos are officially in all the stores. One of my local ones had like a whole aisle of the fucking things ... but those new Cheetos were ... weird?
They came in all kinds of weird flavors, like sour cream and onion, and pizza, and weird shapes and shit. They didn't even have a regular cheese flavor, nor did they have any of the American varieties that'd been sold up to that point.
Nobody fucking bought them, and why would they? They weren't anything like the ones people had actually liked.
That store with the massive Cheetos display never sold one damn bag that I could tell, and then one day the Cheetos were just all gone. Everywhere. No more Cheetos in Finland, at all, other than the occasional appearance of a stale bag of the imported US ones before the launch.
'Cause Finns don't like Cheetos, ig.
Now, you and I will look at that story and it is incredibly obvious what went wrong: they fucked it up.
The capitalist can't admit fault, though, so the conclusion inevitably is just "oh the market doesn't want this thing." And so they're just gone.
And I saw this cycle over and over there, with so many things, but the truth is this pattern is all over capitalism. Someone has a bright idea, or some existing thing exists but not for a particular market, but in trying to "adapt" that thing to a new market, they make a complete dog's breakfast of it, and rather than take away from that "we fucked up", they learn "this thing will never sell here", and it vanishes into received marketing wisdom.
The particular case that prompted this rant, was Cider.
Transgaming was a company who'd made a proprietary fork of Wine that they claimed had some secret sauce that would make game emulation not-painful on Linux, to the mostly ambivalence or horror of the Linux community.
Then came Intel Macs. The new x86 Macs were a big hit when they landed, and publishers started to see potential dollar signs. These new Macbooks seem to be taking off at least, maybe we can pick up some sales?
Transgaming saw an opportunity, quickly recompiled their fork and wrapped it in a neat little package that they claimed would make porting to these Macs an absolute breeze! No effort at all, just dump the Windows version in a folder and wrap it with our new "Cider" program, and it just works!
Of course ... it didn't. Cider ports were infamously slow, infamously buggy, and as the word got out and Mac gamers (few of us tho there were in those days) quickly got wise that "Cider port" was a phrase that spelled doom, or at least a waste of 50 bucks.
Sales tanked, publishers concluded not that they should have made proper ports, but that "well I guess Mac users don't buy games" and Macs just stopped getting any for years. Literally the sites I used to go to for news about Mac games just ... ceased to exist, because there was nothing to write about. Unity and Steam support brought some back eventually, but it was a complete void for years.
And of course we've all seen the cycle of "minority-led movies don't sell," based entirely on the tendency of Hollywood to give such films absolutely zero budget and no marketing, and then act like they were right all along when it inevitably fails.
Once you see the pattern, it becomes infuriating, because so many things with so much potential get cut off at the knees by capitalism itself. I've lost track of many times in the history of tech a promising idea was crapped out underbudget or underdeveloped and it basically tanked the entire concept forever.
We learn all the wrong lessons, over and over, because capitalism is constantly self-defeating. It's not hard to see why a more optimistic mind might've assumed capitalism was simply destined to implode eventually, they just underestimated capital's ability to exploit its own power to avoid the consequences of its actions.
