Greatest market failures

Thread for some of the dumbest shit muh efficient markets have ever created.

As OP I claim the low hanging fruit that is the Juicero (pic related):

$120 million pissed away on a machine which is fucking weaker than humans, only compatible with packs you have to buy from the company, and which has to be connected to the internet.

Unsurprisingly, the company is now defunct.

juicero.com/company-news/

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
youtu.be/etHMTRySvuE?t=193
psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-the-consumer-mind/201603/the-myth-the-rational-consumer
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Skyrim.

Skyrim has some weaknesses, but it isn't an objectively bad game at all.

are you retarded?

It's shit, play Morrowind.

...

Morrowind is better, but I still need to hear an argument as to why Skyrim is such a horrible game.

Lol when that episode came out, i thought that was a legit way of juicing a orange. I was a retarded kid.

Fidget.
Spinners.

its trash compared to what it couldve been, its trash compared to predecessors (read:Morrowind), and its overall a low-effort game that heavily relies on mods to be fun.

Objectively? the game is glitchy and broken in so many aspects, that it just isnt fun for more than one playthrough.

Subjectively? most of the quests about it were uncreative, and it relied to much on having fun with menial tasks or forcing yourself to roleplay and immerse yourself(instead of the game being a good roleplaying game) that it completely fails to be anything other than a cash cow actiona adventure game for the lowest denominator consumer.

tbf, i still adore skytim because of the modding scene, which redeems the game in my opinion. its just vanilla that its conplete ass

Bland quest design, bland npcs, overpriced DLC, unbalanced mechanics, and too little exclusive or impactful choices. Skyrim functions decently as a theme park, but is piss poor as a RPG when compared to other open-world games like Morrowind. That it is better than Faggot Age isn't saying much.

MOD IT TILL YOUR PC EXPLODES

I remember when this came out it blew my mind, but isn't it the same principle of those coffee machines that only accept special capsules? those are popular. why did they not fail? is it only because you don't have to bathe in money to own one?

The handy heater, its a tiny heater that you plug into a outlet. Its supposed to heat up ENTIRE rooms and keep you WARM

Anyone has that picture of the guy who invested a lot into fidget spinners and lost all his money when the fad died?

Wouldn't that be a resounding market success, then?

Lol jk a depressing waste

Uber is a market failure waiting to happen
Turns out when you build a huge company on top of taxis it actually is more expensive.
It is really impressive because they have somehow convinced people that massively increasing the overhead will reduce prices by shifting costs of maintenance upon drivers.
Not to mention how their existence is only due to abuse of competitors and laws that if actually applied would have ended this charade.

I love reading Paul Graham bitch about companies actually having to abide with the law.


Keurig was cheaper and had 3rd party capsules.
Also they supposedly use ethics to source their coffee and morality is expensive.

IIRC the guy who invented Keurig has publicly stated regret because of how much plastic they use. But they are easier (don't have to measure out grounds or deal with filters), and I think that certain people *cough* boomers *cough* get very excited over even the most marginal increase in convenience. Those infomercials that proclaim THERE'S GOTTA BE A BETTER WAY exist for a reason.

And they're not actually bad if you get the reusable metal cups and just fill them with grounds you buy. Brewing one cup at a time is pretty tedious IMO though and the coffee isn't as good when it brews quickly.

I don't think it's weaker then humans, in fact it seems quite strong. It's just really poorly designed. They put in this massively powerful press to squeeze the entire package at once instead of using a roller, or pinching it on one end before closing the rest of the way like a sandwich press, or any of a dozen other smarter ways to solve the problem. Instead they have the plate apply even pressure to the entire surface of the package which multiplies the amount of force they need to use by several orders of magnitude. This is why humans can accomplish the same goal easily despite being weaker- we just squeeze the package one part at a time until it's all juiced.

The SMALT offers mood lighting, an MP3 player AND actually works as a salt shaker too! All this for a mere two hundred american dollars! What a value!!

I'm going to just nominate the entire scam industry. It's one thing to make a product that accidentally fails like the juicero, and another to make a product that was designed to fail and contributes absolutely nothing except to extract wealth from the less informed, while wasting resources. The monster cables are the odd ones out in that they technically will deliver a working product, however it's needlessly priced ten times or more then equivalent, equally functional cables (since a digital signal can't be improved by better quality cable).

I can't remember a single character or questline from Skyrim, while I can for Morrowind and even Oblivion.

Honestly the R&D process should have been giving a hundred packs to a bunch of toddlers to play with and noting the most efficient way they devised to squeeze it out.
This criticism applies to a lot of these projects.

Well I can remember the mage's guild questline, but only because it was such a fucking disappointment. They dedicate a good deal of time to a guided tour, slowly walking around the place, meeting the other students, learning about the college, and getting a really good feel for the atmosphere. They design the space so the guild is literally detached from the rest of the gameworld, subconsciously implying that you should buckle up and get ready to immerse yourself into a new little world of comfy magic classes and fellow student shenanigans, completely unlike anything else in the game. And just as soon as you get comfortable they pull the rug out from under you and send you on another 'epic' fetch quest where you'll become the big hero by killing lots of draugr in caves.

I read a line from a long form review of the entire series that really sums it up. In oblivion, they simplified it so that one character can potentially play through everything in the entire game, eliminating the need to create separate characters to play through mutually exclusive questlines and guilds. In skyrim, they simplified it even further by making it so that one playstyle can play through everything in the entire game. All you ever need to do is go to caves and kill draugr, nothing more and nothing different is ever expected out of you.

Most of NPCs look like they stink like shit

Could not have said it better. Though I feel like I should defend Oblivion, despite all its flaws it had some great quests in it, especially the small one shot quests outside big story chains. I still remember the two goblin villages at war, the invisible village, the painter stuck in the painting, the scepter that made some imps follow you because the object was cursed… Compared to its predecessor Skyrim is completely devoid of storytelling.
sage because we are a bit OT

Planned obsolescence has always been the most disgusting outcome of markets to me. Batteries welded inside electric razors so you have to buy a new one when they die. Printers with chips inside to make them fail after a set number of print jobs. Scores of iPhone models worse than the last with ways to force the user to buy extra shit just to plug in headphones. The international cartel of light bulb manufacturers which continues to exist to ensure that competitors don't produce light bulbs that last for too long and kill their own profits.

...

Fucking social networks.
Are they a failuire buisness wise?
No.
Are they the greatest fucking plague that ever affected the human race?
Yes.

I don't see how you can lame that on markets.

It's no different from covfefe machines when you think about it.

I guess MySpace was not real capitalism.

Meant for
I imagine

ITT: people confuse markets with capitalism (again)

The United States has six times as many empty homes as homeless people.

Oh yeah sorry.

Capitalism is the exchange of goods, don't you know?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Well you have the worthless infotainment systems on cars, where you have the functionality of a tablet embedded into the car, that is a point of failure for the car. Yet it is entirely redundant, want to search for nearby hotels, a tablet or smart phone can do that, plus Apple and Android actually update their shit.

Morrowind was better but Oblivion was undoubtedly worse than Skyrim. Oblivion was one of the worst RPGs I've played.
I think Bethesda has one of the biggest budget and development crew in the business, and I think if you create a world this big this is about as detailed as you can make it. Compared to Oblivion - or even Morrowind - the recognition value of locations increased dramatically, I can remember the most random corners, this proves that it had a good mapping.
This is where we can agree. Apart from the Witcher, which RPG actually has creative quests though?


This is what you are getting when you buy an Elder Scroll, you are getting a theme park. The whole concept of these games is to enjoy the world-building. People were afraid Skyrim was going to be a frozen wasteland yet they managed to make it diverse. The only thing that bothered me was that they've decided to remove the Nordic gods and replaced them with the imperial Nine Divines.

That shit looks dangerous. I bet some of these caused house fires.

I'm sorry but Oblivion was a lot better than Skyrim in everything but art style. Granted both main quests sucked, but the rest of Oblivion was far more engaging than Skyrim. Even the DLCs (outside horse armor) were fantastic, while Skyrim's ones were average at best.

hah, au contraire
youtu.be/etHMTRySvuE?t=193

wat
this shit is clearly not saving anything
it even has a LED
what in the actual fuck

Skyrim's Hearthfire was a disappointment but Dragonborn was better than the main quest. Revisiting Solstheim was a great idea.

The world design of Oblivion fucking sucks, they went for the most generic and stereotypical medieval scenario, I was expecting rainforests and Romanesque culture but Todd Howard saw Lord of the Rings and liked it. The graphics are ugly and the Imperial City is the most dead location I've ever seen. Also setting up the starting point of the player in the Imperial City was a big fucking mistake. The monsters and bandits were scaling making the player effectively weaker when you level up. Oblivion also didn't have factions you could join, there were no politics. Joining the warrior or the mage guild - could you make something more vanilla? The quests were alright, but that doesn't redeem such a trashy world. You seem to look for things in an Elder Scroll that they are not supposed to provide.

This. Also Oblivion is almost unplayable for thief characters due to that stupid leveling system. Also the AI is really strange.

I don't understand, I looked on amazon and it seems this thing is at least 20 bucks, if not more. For 20 bucks you can buy a regular, if cheapo plastic heater which is about as likely to break and set fire to your house, but will at least actually heat the fuck out of whatever you point it at/the room it is in until the day it catches fire. Who is buying this thing? It's maybe a quarter the size of a regular heater so just from looking at it, it should be obvious that it's far less powerful and usable then any other heater on the shelf. The only thing I can think of is that it's sold in the south where there aren't any other heaters on the shelf.

This entire thread is dumb, people can try and sell anything they want even if the product/service is dumb as shit. The market is (in theory) efficient precisely because such failures never took off and are mocked by consumers.
Yes you have dumb shit that still gets used despite being shitty/non-efficient because of corporate lobbying/monopolies/cartels/etc but I only see a few of these mentioned ITT.
Besides I don't get why communism would magically solve this, if the central planning committee chooses a product as hilariously under-engineered and wasteful as juicero as the only juice press in the land, because they fell for the same buzzwords the 120$ million worth of investors fell for in our system, the consumers will still get a juicero press because unlike in a market system, they individually have no say in what gets bought/distributed.

I'm just going to ignore how, under Communism, people are really retarded, but under Capitalism they somehow manage to usually make the right decisions.
The Juicero was a cash grab. A Communist society just won't have cash grabs. I think it is self explanatory why this is the case.

Sorry, just noticed this
LMAO at you.

Did you just forgot to read
People's intelligence isn't determined by any economic system, they will always remain borderline braindead.

Consumer =/= Person
A person is usually both a consumer and a producer of some sort. As producers we are indeed (most of the time) completely powerless, which is why capitalism is so thorough in brainwashing us into thinking we're only consumers and not producers. Because as consumers we aren't completely powerless, simply because we're not forced to buy specific products most of the time.

Undialectical AND unmaterialist, imagine my shock that you aren't a Communist. This statement is so far removed from reality I don't know what to say to you other than, people are intelligent enough to pick out quality products, when educated. How do you think engineers and scientists even work??? What is your response to someone that is an expert on something? Just a placid "No you're not"? Like you think someone that literally designs for a living and is an expert surrounded by other experts can't pick out a quality product??? I hope my question marks have gotten even one tenth of my confusion through to you.
Then what the fuck are they you stupid nigger?! Do you think that during socialist revolution we will turn people into snakes?! Zebras??? I can only imagine the ungodly amount of brain damage that must have occurred to you to even consider saying that consumers aren't people. People WILL consume under Socialism, holy wow. I can ONLY assume that is what you meant by your consumers=/=people argument, surely not the above or some "But have you considered the 0.001%that subsist on production.".

That's not what I got with Morrowind, and if we're looking at other Bethshit games New Vegas also managed to pull out a decent RPG where Fallout 3 and 4 failed. There's no reactivity to Skyrim, you can assassinate the emperor and the only thing that happens is guards whisper some shit at you. Compare this to New Vegas where if you kill the NCR president or Caesar the relevant faction shoot you on sight and send hit squads after you with no ability to repair the relationship. In Skyrim you can sack cities and the townsfolk don't care that you just couped their jarl, you can turn into a werewolf or vampire in public view and you're good if you pay a fine, and reactions to factions are nonexistent outside of the guards.
Pillars of Eternity, particularity the White March expansion.

… do you read posts in their entirety before responding or do you just take a quick glance at the general feel of it and then fabricate some outraged response?

no they're not, that's a lie peddled by lolbergs to evade calls for the regulation.
psychologytoday.com/blog/inside-the-consumer-mind/201603/the-myth-the-rational-consumer

Dolce Gusto and Americano is where it is at, anyway.

I actually own one of these to heat up my microhouse made out of an airport luggage cart. It does a pretty good job tbh, much more convenient than a regular heater since I only have about 40 sq feet of floor space.

A rational consumer has almost nothing to do with experts in w/e field the Juicero applies to deciding to make the Juicero in a society that has NO incentive to make it.
Yeah m8 on this board we do this kooky thing called arguing and sometimes people say crazy shit and I insult them. Way the world rides the tortoise, my friend.

Social Darwinism™

Im saying every fat fuck like that is a failure of capitalism and free market. Nazis at least promoted a healthy man, not bags of fat caused by consumerism.

Thats true. Capitalism is just accepting every result as correct. Car that doesnt run is a working car in capitalism, necause it has its reasons not to.

So the thread is confusing capitalist markets for markets in general?

I pay $30 for a gym membership and have some decent parks to job in around where I live, why would I want to walk in a videogame instead of kill shit with the limited amount time I have to play vidya?

take a lap