Economics for Fanboys

In the video game industry, there exists a large group of annoying pests. They enjoy creating large walls of text, lack essential vitamins given by the sun, and all in all fail to have a social life. They are called fanboys, and they will stop at nothing to convince you to purchase the console of their favourite company.

I used to be a Nintendo fanboy, until I realized that Nintendo doesn't hire them - they hire ADULTS. Additionally, I realized that I was missing out of life too, so I decided to stop being a fanboy, and start acting like a fan.

Take this example, a Sony fanboy walks into Sony's head office and apply for a job. He uses his knowledge of Sony products, the products he owns, and how he rambles on YouTube about how great PlayStation 3 and Blu-Ray is, as his best reason for being hired. Do you know what the Sony representative would say? "In that room, there is Sony merchandise you can buy, anything you want. Now run along child!" With a big happy grin.

It's a sad fate, these children are trapped within their own minds, babbling about childish things that no one of the majority population cares about. People care about the world - and when it comes to entertainment, film and music. Not video games. You can see my explanation on that topic in my previous blog post, and my first YouTube vlog post.

The hilarious part is that from an economic standpoint, their actions actually bog down the performance of their companies. According to the teachings of economics, competition is essential to a healthy economy. How so? Well let's take a trip back in time to the days of the Nintendo Gamecube. Nintendo was suffering under the massive beating taken by Xbox and PlayStation 2. Since Nintendo was in a difficult position, they were forced to do something different. They decided to release a test product called the Nintendo DS. An innovative handheld that sported a touch screen, and tapped into an untapped casual market with game like Brain Age. If it were to fail, then they'd still have the GameBoy franchise as a back-up. However, it did succeed extremely well - far past the expectations that it would fail to the PSP. So with that, Nintendo knew that their spin on gaming was a success, so why not create the home console based on this paradigm. Out came the Wii, sporting motion controls, and bringing the entire family back to the living room.

Competition encourages innovation. Without competition, there would be no motive to succeed, improve, and innovate. The business world would be bland and uninteresting. Customers would be stuck with the same products, and at unreasonably high prices (since again there's no competition).

Let's say a fanboy convinces someone to purchase their favorite company's product - a flawed and inferior product. The new customer would then have a bad outlook on the company, and be less likely to purchase its next product.

This is why fanboyism needs to end, because they are actually doing more of an injustice for their company than they think, and thus are working against what they hope to accomplish. It's like killing something to keep it alive; it makes no sense.

Be fans, not fanboys! =)