It's more like an investment in infrastructure. The city isn't making a dime from repaving roads, but they certainly are useful. It's a bit of a gamble if they'll develop potholes or even get finnished sometimes, but people want roads.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

What? City is absolutely making money from repaving roads. The businesses that use those roads pay taxes, people that work in those businesses pay taxes. Good infrastructure brings more businesses and more people and let's city grow. You put money in it and it brings benefits later. That's exactly what investment is.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And people stay productive by enjoying hobbies and playing games. It's an investment in infrastructure, just like fire, healthcare, police, power, water, transportation, etc.

Also, most roads in North America are cash negative, with many cities building new suburbs with high tax to pay for the roads in the previous suburb which are falling apart, which were built to pay for the next last suburb, on and on until the first car-centric suburbs were built in the 50s and 60s. Low density housing rarely pays for it's public utilities directly, needing to essentially be subsidised by city centers to be worth it, and then you replace business with parking lots and everything gets so much worse...

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And people stay productive by enjoying hobbies and playing games. It’s an investment in infrastructure, just like fire, healthcare, police, power, water, transportation, etc.

You can enjoy hobbies without paying for unfinished games, early access is completely besides the point here. You can buy games when those are ready and be equally productive. If you like early access games you're free to buy them, I have nothing against it. But it's not an 'investment'. It just a discount.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago

There are thousands of great game that wouldn't have got off the ground without early access, so not participating could absolutely change the quality of the final product. In many ways, early access in one step removed from crowdsourcing, which is an investment in an idea.

Investments aren't necessarily about leveraging capital to generate more capital. It would be a very sad life to live where everything must be categorized by ROI.