• Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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    11 hours ago

    Some projects will end up being a waste of resources, but others end up printing a ton of money.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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      9 hours ago

      Sure, but anything that “The point wasn’t even to make a product out of it” is 100% definitely a waste of resources. So either they’re intentionally throwing money in the garbage or the intent absolutely was to make a product out of it…

      • john117@lemmy.jmsquared.net
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        4 hours ago

        this is how I know you’ve never created anything, lol. lots of times, you fail at making something, but you learn from those failures.

        who knows what other projects they threw money at and failed, the only one I can think of rn were the steam machines.

        I’m sure they learned from those mistakes, tried again, and here we are with the steam deck

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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          37 minutes ago

          this is how I know you’ve never created anything

          So I suppose you spend millions funding engineers to create products as personal toys with no intention of selling any of them?

          • john117@lemmy.jmsquared.net
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            24 minutes ago

            thats called R&D. I don’t personally spend millions of dollars, but I do spend money on things that never pan out but teach me a lot of lessons I can apply to my next project

        • SoJB@lemmy.ml
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          7 hours ago

          That user legitimately spends all day posting pedantic BS lmao, this is hilarious.

          Literally the archetype of le Reddit neckbeard to a tee, Christ what a loser

      • Jrockwar@feddit.uk
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        8 hours ago

        It’s not a waste of resources if you learn something. Think of this as research rather than product development. You can try many things (from VR, to miniaturised computers, to cloud gaming, controllers with wonky form factors…) to see what results in a good experience. You don’t need to get anywhere near a full fledged product to understand those things, so the waste of resources isn’t massive anyway.

        I’d bet at the moment people decided “this is useful, I even want this for me, so let’s turn it into a product” the steam deck looked more like a screen, a gamepad and a raspberry pi all taped together or jammed into a 3d printed prototype chassis.

        If people have spare capacity to work on these projects, the material cost at such a point can be under <5k which is peanuts for a company like Valve.

      • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip
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        6 hours ago

        Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?

        Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?

        … You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?

        … Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

        • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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          51 minutes ago

          do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

          I’m sure 0% of them did but 100% of them were researching to find products to sell.