Hidden Monopolies and the Illusion of Choice: How Companies Trick You by Creating More… Companies
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 2019-11-14

After finally finishing my Android app PowerWord 2 (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.com.mountfordstudios.powerword2), one thing that I noticed while doing research for the game was just how saturated the app market truly is. For example, if you do a search for “word games”, as with all things Google, you’ll get back literally hundreds of results, for example, Wordscapes. If you continue looking through the search results, you might just notice that there is a bit of a pattern occurring: Word Cookies; Word Connect; Word Cross; Word Nut; Word Find; Word Bliss; Word Flowers; Word Connect (again); Word Game; Word Charm; Word Vistas; Word Sushi; Word Fire; and Word Poo (okay, I made that last one up). But the list goes on and on with similar sounding games. If you’ve played any of these games, you’ll very quickly realise, they’re pretty much the same game. And I’m not just saying that they’re similar. Some of them are exactly the same (apart from the title, graphics, and the name of the developer). So what’s going on here? Well, I think there’s one of two things that is happening. Either developers are just copying each other, that is, they see a winning formula and try to mimic other successful games (there’s certainly an element of that), or most of these games are made by the same developer. I’m guessing the latter. The goal is to flood the market with the same game over and over again. The average consumer thinks they are getting a great range of options, but instead they’re getting the royal screwgie. It’s the same game repeated hundreds of times. Is this practice of tricking consumers into thinking that they’re getting a wide range of options common? It certainly is. As I mentioned in the title, I like to call them “hidden monopolies” — companies that trick us into believing that we’re buying from different companies, when in fact, they own the whole bloody lot. Just like the boardgame monopoly, the average consumer is a pawn in this global game for our money.

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#monopoly #hiddeninplainsight #capitalism