There are many, such as a lot of Paradox games, Aurora 4X, and so on. Few are based on the present state of the world, though. That doesn't make it any less an issue of geopolitics.
It is true that there are several such games. The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear. The efficient market hypothesis is something of a pet peeve of mine, and so I try to call it out when it is erroneously used as support for, well, anything.
> The statement I was replying to goes above and beyond that to say that there are as many as the market can bear.
There are a lot of these games. And the techniques behind designing a "good" geo-political strategy game are very well understood by now. It's also a market that is cheap to develop for, because these games don't typically rely on expensive, cutting-edge art assets.
It's reasonable to assume that the market for these games is saturated, as mature, well understood, low capital investment markets tend to be.
I disagree with your assertion that it's well understood how to make a good geopolitical strategy game. Most of them struggle with scaling issues; they turn into micromanagement grinds once the scale of simulation gets large enough.
There's a lot left to be discovered in terms of what control schemes and other features result in a fun experience. I have ideas on how to make a better 4x game but I would rather make a PoC than give them away for free. :)
Fair enough, but I think we can agree that the techniques behind building a geopolitical strategy game that sells well is understood. The past three Civilization games have surpassed 5 million units each.
Paradox games has several games in the million+ club, and their games are insanely complicated niche games which take longer to learn than most AAA titles take to complete.
On the other end of the spectrum is Off World Trading Company. That game is the essence of great strategy distilled down into little more than the fundamentals.
I'm no economist, and I didn't want to imply efficient market. More of a guesswork: there are a lot of those games out, some successful, some failed. They usually require quite some involvement to play at good level so I suppose people don't really jump to a new game immediately. They take a ton of time to develop and if they were more popular, I'm quite sure there would be more of them. Contrast this with for example the RTS genre, which is practically extinct.
Haha, that's brilliant! I didn't see the article, do you have a link? I can visualize the core argument, that at a fundamental level the EMH is saying that optimization problems under constraints are a solved problem, and I'm curious what other details/formalism go into it.
Is this an appeal to the efficient market hypothesis, or do you have some actual evidence to support this statement?