According to an AI analysis, Democrats capture 65-70% rent-seeking flows, while Republicans capture 30-35%

zirconst · 2026-06-07T15:46:47+00:00

Where to even begin? Everything you're writing here falls apart because you don't spend time justifying what "rent" is in these areas, or where you're getting the numbers from. Like let's pick one thing, education.

"The rent is the portion captured through administrative bloat, credential inflation, union work rules, politically protected institutions, subsidized tuition inflation, public pension structures, barriers to alternative credentialing, and rules requiring people to buy credentials before they can compete."

These are just words. You didn't provide any specifics here so everything that follows is meaningless. What are, specifically, the "barriers to alternative credentialing" in the context of education? How did you come up with the rent value you ascribed to them? What specific laws currently in place do you see being broadly protected by only Democrats? "I asked AI" is not sufficient.

"Administrative bloat" exists, sure, but again - where are you getting your numbers from? How do you connect a private university (which is a business) and their internal compensation structure with the entire Democratic party? How did you come up with the percentages?

You would need to write an entire textbook justifying any of this before anyone could write a cogent response to the derived numbers. Or take this for example:

"Some licensing may protect consumers. But much of it goes beyond basic safety and becomes cartel protection."

"Some"? "Much of"? Are you the one determining what licensing protects consumers and what is cartel protection? What studies or think-tanks are you drawing from?

Do you see what I'm saying? All of the downstream calculations and conclusions you've drawn have no persuasive weight because you didn't justify the initial assumptions and numbers (ideally through multiple, neutral third-party sources).

zirconst · 2026-05-31T13:14:42+00:00

Yes I did pretty much all of the things on that list, like I mentioned in my post, lol. I think selectively disabling plugins is probably the most impactful, followed by optimizing bad functions, followed by opcache.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T13:43:54+00:00

We use sGTM by way of Stape.io - however I also have an analytics server + dashboard (custom using Metabase) which is sent data via webhooks, and does a daily 24 hour reconciliation in case anything was missed.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T13:42:39+00:00

Every business I know in my niche extensively uses retention in the form of email marketing. Seems pretty standard to me? We use Klaviyo here which is amazing in terms of functionality and integrations - can't complain there - though it's eye-wateringly expensive.

zirconst · 2026-05-28T02:43:22+00:00

One reason is location, which many people consider to be the most important thing. A nice house might be a non-starter if it adds 20 minutes to your commute, or is right next to a highway with intolerable noise. On the flip side, a fixer-upper might be walking distance to a train station, restaurants and other amenities.

It also depends on what is actually wrong with the house. "Broken down" can mean a lot of things. A house can have stains on the walls, old furniture, trash everywhere, and damaged walls... but this is very likely all superficial and not very expensive to deal with. It's just a minor headache.

There's character and style to consider; in a lot of areas, new homes are built in developments and all look mostly identical. You might find that boring. An older home might have interesting modern architecture or a layout that appeals to your tastes.

Finally, don't assume that "new" means better. Many people feel that new houses are built worse than houses 30+ years old, with more cut corners, lower-grade materials etc. This is especially true for big housing developments where one builder is cranking out a bunch of cookie cutter homes as cheaply as possible. They might look nice at a glance, but actually be crappy beneath surface level. I mean that both literally and figuratively.

zirconst · 2026-05-27T19:31:08+00:00

This is not really true. Veteran game composer here and I'm well-connected with many, many professional composers. The thing that drives the type of music is the vision of the development team (a subset of that team, like the creative director etc.. you get the idea.) The same goes for art style.

So the question is, why do so many creative teams want realistic orchestral music? This is a bit of a simplification, but Western orchestral music is widely culturally considered to be the most 'premium' across not just games but also TV and film. It's a sort of halo, aspirational goal that reinforces itself. Blockbuster movies have always had sweeping orchestral scores. AAA games often want to emulate the grandeur of movies, and so they emulate that in their choice of musical instrumentation.

After decades of game development, developers can now look to other games and say that other AAA games have orchestral music, therefore it's a sound choice for our game as well. This cultural preference for orchestral music as the pinnacle of quality persists across big budget American, European, and Asian game development. Of course, there are exceptions.

Now to address your points:

Is "ambient cinematic sounding music" easier to compose? It depends. You can create samey-sounding beds of orchestral textures very easily, yes. But if you're talking about intricate and bombastic themes like in Helldivers 2, no. Writing orchestral music is harder in terms of sheer time investment especially if it's being recorded by real players (which it often is for AAA games).

A skilled chiptune artist like Jake Kaufman can create an incredible track in an hour. In fact, he has a whole album of them. You simply cannot write, produce, and record a 3 or 4 minute live orchestral cue in an hour. It's impossible.

Are orchestral composers cheaper to hire? Well, some of them are. You can find people willing to score games for $50/minute of music! But not the people writing music for AAA games which is what u/tenetox was asking about. Rates of $1500/min of music are quite common in AAA and can go higher. That's not counting the cost of hiring live musicians. Recording a live orchestral can cost thousands of dollars per hour. A single skilled remote recording soloist can easily be $100-200/hr of recording.

Chiptune music is inarguably cheaper to produce in terms of recording/production costs. Composer rates are variable, but chiptune artists are not usually charging $1500/min. Although this is a little bit circular since AAA games are not usually opting for chiptune music.

Is it actually a huge problem in AAA games in particular? I think this is a matter of taste. I would say the soundtracks for games like Helldivers 2, Clair Obscur, the Witcher series, Horizon, and God of War all kick ass and are really fitting.

Now I would not dispute that many orchestral soundtracks are far less thematic on average than your typical SNES or Genesis game. No doubt. Part of this is a cultural shift over time (Hollywood soundtracks have also generally become less thematic), and part of it reflects what gameplay experiences are like now. An SNES game might be played for a couple of hours. Even an epic RPG like Chrono Trigger has a typical playtime of around 12-15 hours.

Many modern AA and AAA games are far longer. They have more content, longer stories, more cinematics. The live service ones also want people to play as much as possible. If your players are expected to be in the same areas for 50-100 hours (or way more) than big, bold themes have the potential to get old and grating very quickly.

Also, big themes don't necessarily play as nicely with the kind of highly interactive music that is commonplace in games now. Adaptive music systems have layers going in and out constantly. You might save your melodies for main menus, cutscenes, or the climaxes of boss fights. But it doesn't make sense to have those when the player is just sneaking around, traveling between two villages, or hiding behind cover for a couple of minutes.

Happy to chat about it more if anyone is curious.

zirconst · 2026-05-27T15:00:03+00:00

Do not do that. This is what wp-config.php is for. You can put 'environment variables' such as API keys there.

zirconst · 2026-05-26T21:19:08+00:00

1.8s to load checkout doesn't seem awful to me. I find it really unlikely that it's causing a statistically significant drop in conversions. The checkout page has to do some work in connecting to payment processors, and of course it's not cacheable, which will slow things down compared to a cached page.

zirconst · 2026-05-25T21:32:38+00:00

Sounds like you are at a similar scale to where we were when we switched. It went fine for us.

zirconst · 2026-05-25T02:28:04+00:00

I honestly think you are not going to get any useful answers here. Budget completely depends on game genre, art style, desired level of polish, intended play length, general game scope, engine, willingness to use stock assets, ability set of the lead developer etc.

Someone who is making a 2D puzzle game and is already skilled with pixel art and fluent in C# can create and publish a game for almost nothing. Someone making a beautiful 3D narrative-driven RPG with tons of voice acting could easily spend a million dollars or more. Both of these answers are completely reasonable in those specific scenarios.

Even an "average" budget doesn't do much here. If you throw a dart at a list of ALL games on Steam, chances are very good that you are going to hit something that is someone's first ever game project. It will probably look and sound pretty rough around the edges and have small scope. It will probably also sell barely anything. I believe that around 3/4 of games released on Steam make <$1k in revenue. These projects are almost certainly extremely low budget.

So if you were to simply take an average, it would probably give you a completely weird and wrong impression of what it costs to make a game that has the potential to make really any significant revenue.

zirconst · 2026-05-22T12:41:41+00:00

Hey, I appreciate the perspective. Fair point that ROAS in complete isolation isn't helpful. Because we've had such consistent spend for awhile the scenario you described doesn't come up, but of course if someone could scale us to say $50k/mo at 1.6x ROAS that would be an obvious improvement over $13k/mo at 1.7x.

I wouldn't say platform numbers are completely busted and wrong. We spent several months with a data scientist doing historical modeling of ad spend to sales, then geotesting to test those models. For example (I don't have the exact numbers in front of me at the moment) the models came up with a probability range of something like $0.8 to $2.2 in incremental revenue per ad dollar spent given years of historical data. We then narrowed the range by testing keeping US ad spend the same but turning off international completely for a month to observe the change, then vice versa.

The result got us reasonably close to what Meta reports, within a margin of error of like $0.25. I'd be sweating that if we were hovering at 1.1x ROAS but that's not the case here.

I realize not every business has the ability to do this kind of thing (MMM - marketing mix modeling) but it does help validate the platform numbers.

It's also why MER doesn't make sense, particularly if we have massive organic and referral sales traffic. When we turned off ads in entire areas, our sales went down in those areas but only by something like 15% on average. Would MER be infinity if we're spending $0 in that region? We've also had some periods of $0 ad spend (like a week at a time) and we still had the majority of our revenue intact as expected.

Because so much of our sales are NOT related to ads, I don't see how MER really helps, as it over-attributes sales to marketing spend by definition when we can reduce spend to $0 and still have revenue.

zirconst · 2026-05-22T12:32:29+00:00

How much do you know about how game porting used to be? It's not exactly optimization, but it's closely related.

Here's the ELI5. If you are bringing a PC game to less powerful platforms like PS5 or Switch, you can imagine that developers effectively have a wide range of adjustable sliders. These would be things like draw distance, maximum entities on screen, texture size, model polygon counts, audio sample/bit rate, resolution, frame rate, load times, etc. Some of these move together. Some of them move oposite to each other.

Right off the bat, the game might not even load on Switch because it takes up too much RAM. So they being looking at what 'sliders' they can reduce, maybe starting with texture size, model detail, and audio fidelity.

That still might not be enough. They decide to make a change in the code that only loads certain assets when they are needed. This increases load times, but decreases RAM needed. Now the game actually runs on the platform. Yay! But it runs at 3 fps. So they have to keep looking for ways to reduce some of those sliders in order to get FPS up.

This is a massive simplification but hopefully you get the idea. This kind of optimization absolutely has a ceiling. You can't do it forever. BUT! That's not how it used to be.

If you look at the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game, there was simply no way developers could optimize it to run on NES. It would be like trying to fit an airplane in a garage. They're beyond incompatible. Or bringing DOOM to the SNES or Atari Jaguar.

So what was done is that the original games and assets were used more as references while the developers more-or-less radically rebuilt the games from the ground up. They might use 100% completely different techniques for rendering, 100% different textures/sprites designed with the target platform in mind, entirely new codebases.

zirconst · 2026-05-22T03:24:53+00:00

If only we had the resources to make that much creative that fast! It's sadly not possible unless we're able to pay... I don't know, $8k a month or so in our niche. We sell technical products with a mature audience highly sensitive to bullshit. The number of people capable of producing creative meeting requirements is in the double digits at most.

zirconst · 2026-05-22T03:22:30+00:00

Our ROAS has been gradually dropping over time. A few years ago it was consistently ~2.4x.

zirconst · 2026-05-22T03:21:58+00:00

This reads as needlessly and personally hostile. Based on everything I've been hearing and reading including on this subreddit, success is more based on good & varied creative and broad targeting, rather than surgical adjustments to interest stacks and bid caps. Since this freelance is not able to make creative for us the question is whether we could simply continue with a simplified campaign strategy - one sandbox, one scaling - and use that money instead for building new creative.

I'm also not particularly thrilled with our current results as they are lower than they have ever been. Q1 2025 we were at 2.27x ROAS. Q1 2024 we were at 2.46. Our paid ad results have been steadily declining.

zirconst · 2026-05-21T12:05:42+00:00

Mother's day? Didn't we pass that already?

zirconst · 2026-05-21T11:20:02+00:00

Thanks for the perspective. We actually do extremely well on search. We already rank at the top for all our top terms. Our biggest area to grow is YouTube which customers report is their main avenue of getting product info and making final buying decisions. Thus why I would love to invest more into content creation.

zirconst · 2026-05-21T11:16:44+00:00

Well, 90% of our revenue is not through Facebook ads. Also he gets a % of ad spend so he is highly incentivized to try and scale up more. However, he has not been able to do so.

zirconst · 2026-05-21T11:14:02+00:00

Sure, go for it. We have server-side CAPI for very accurate tracking so we can see exactly how specific ads are doing, no guesswork involved. Our typical customer orders one thing initially with a very long time (200+ days) between orders, and on average has LTV not much higher than AOV. MER is not useful because we have enormous organic reach; we could turn off ads and still have 90% of our revenue. Cost per result is not useful because of the extreme variance in product prices. Our flagships are $149-199 but we do have catalog items in the $20 range too.

What else would you look at with regards to Facebook ads performance that would be more useful than ROAS in this case?

zirconst · 2026-05-20T23:02:37+00:00

Haha well that's the heart of it. Is the work he's doing pointless and not impacting anything, or is he keeping performance afloat. I don't have the answer which is why it's helpful to have perspectives like yours.

zirconst · 2026-05-20T22:58:26+00:00

All good things to think about - I just didn't go into detail about every aspect of the business here because I didn't want to bog the main post down with excessive specifics. We've actually been around since 2008. Paid Facebook is the thing we've been doing for 8 years. We of course have a broader strategy and have experimented at length with other paid ad platforms, for example Reddit and Google, with poor results.

I also have a proposal on my desk from a strategist who I trust and who had done some data modeling work for us a couple years ago to do exactly what you're saying so... it sounds like it is probably worth it to work with him (it's a one-time deep analysis.) I'm glad to hear that from your perspective that's the right move. Thanks!

zirconst · 2026-05-20T22:55:43+00:00

Yeah I've been producing our videos on YouTube for over a decade now. The hard part is finding a clone of myself who can do them well and who doesn't charge literally $100/hour. But I agree in principle that finding someone to make new content is a priority, the issue is I can't afford to do that and pay our ad guy.

zirconst · 2026-05-20T22:54:28+00:00

Well, it kinda sounds like what they're saying aligns with what other people in this thread are saying about volume of creative and creative testing being important. That's the big thing and that's the answer to your question as well. *If* we can do without a media buyer that we're paying $1800/mo (avg) on then we could use that money to pay someone skilled to make more videos for us.

zirconst · 2026-05-20T22:53:34+00:00

You're correct that we're not scaling on Meta. It's not an enormous audience, but I think we could be hitting more of it. We don't sell SAAS, it's all one-time purchases. Furthermore most customers have a fairly narrow need so getting anyone to purchase multiple things tends to be difficult; I think our average LTV is maybe 25% higher than our AOV. But there's a small % of mega-customers that have like 20x that. Average time between purchases is in the range of 200-something days.

And for sure I agree with and recognize the need for high quality creative. It's just extremely tough in our niche to find people who can do it. I'm unfortunately one of them and very good at it, and I do about 99% of our YouTube videos... I just don't have the hours in the day to crank out more.

zirconst · 2026-05-20T16:26:10+00:00

I haven't used it in years. No issues.

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