To begin with, we need to first understand what anti-rival means. In economics rival goods are usually physical products which encourage competition and has a definite price. The price doesn’t have to be monetary. It can be time, energy or social. For example a cup of coffee can only be consumed by one person and not others. Usually, rival goods behave well into the supply-demand model. On the other hand, non-rival goods are things and services that can be used by many without costing anyone. For example, the internet is a good example of this. One person’s use of the internet does not diminish the use from others as long as the infrastructure is keep growing. Most public goods like high way roads or the metro networks are also non-rival goods. However when the capacity of a non-rival service is full or nearly full, it can quickly transform into rival goods. There is yet another term that goes beyond non-rival and it is called anti-rival goods. The value of anti-rival good increases the more people are using it. They are quite rare in general but in certain industries they rule supreme. The tech industry for example is full of anti-rival services. Big social media companies like Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat outcompete everyone else due to its anti-rival nature. The more people use Facebook, the more valuable Facebook becomes and the more people find it hard to quit such a valuable service.

I will borrow the terms from Devil May Cry 4 game to explain the difficulty of succeeding in each of these markets.

Rival goods = Devil Hunter (Normal Difficulty). The conditions to succeed in a rival goods market is obvious. Either provide the same product with lower price or provide a superior product with slightly higher price. The best option is to provide a better product at a lower price. Everything else is supplementary.

Non-rival goods = Dante Must Die (Very hard difficulty). Providing non-rival goods require an enormous amount of resources. Therefore only early providers will become the dominant players in the market. If you are starting out in an established non-rival market, everyone will be very hostile and they only want to see your downfall. Your loved ones will think you are crazy and your competitors will do everything in their power to discourage you from proving yourself in the market. Unless you have high profile connections or a massive amount of resources, your chances of succeeding are very low.

Anti-rival goods = Hell or Hell (Extremely hard difficulty). In Devil May Cry games, enemies kill you with just one hit while they take an absurd amounts of hits to kill in Hell or Hell mode. This is what you will feel every day when you compete in an anti-rival market. It is the ultimate test of your patience, knowledge, experience, instinct and a lot of luck. It’s very easy to fail if your product isn’t good enough because hardly anyone will use it. The slight improvement of your established competitors’ service can bring you out of business overnight. The only way to win in this market is innovation and timing. Having a lot of resources help tremendously but if your product isn’t unique enough or badly timed, the customers will go to your competitors without caring at all about you. Well-known anti-rival industries are the tech industry and the entertainment industry.

Anti-rival industries are perfect to study because it is extremely difficult to succeed in. It is also because the lessons from anti-rival industries can be used in rival or non-rival industries to reinvent oneself in its respective market.

Now we shall see an example of the two games with different levels of resources achieving similar levels of success.

Rocket League is a simplified version of football that you play with rocket cars. As many people know, FIFA games are all about realistic football simulation. It’s hard to describe how they are played in words, so I’ll let you watch their gameplay videos instead.

I have made this value curve to explain why they achieve similar levels of success while their levels of resources are vastly different.

In terms of football, both of them plays like football but if the players want to play a superior football experience, they will choose FIFA 16 over rocket league any day.

The game of rocket league doesn’t exist in the real world and its rules and concepts only work within its environment and nowhere else. FIFA 16 tries to simulate the real feeling of football and so it is better in this category. EA developers put in a massive amount of resources like hiring talented designers, commentators, partnerships with real football teams and players to make sure the game is as realistic as possible.

In terms of multiplayer, they both have cooperative and competitive game modes that are both fun and addicting. That said, FIFA multiplayer is better due to better servers and online support. EA has put a lot of resources to make the game systems perform at a high quality rate.

Rocket League understands that it can’t compete against FIFA in real football experience. Therefore, the developers decided to invent a new value. Playing football with rocket cars. This innovation exist nowhere in the market and as it turns out, the concept works remarkably well. Controlling the physics of a small car to hit a massive beach ball takes skill and quick thinking which FIFA 16 cannot provide. In other words, this is its unique selling point. But there’s more.

Unpredictability is fun because the brain has to keep up with the rules of the game to tame the unpredictability. There are some unpredictable moments in FIFA 16 but due to its automation, the majority of matches play rather predictably. On the other hand, Rocket League is a fest of unpredictability. When multiple cars hit the ball, the ball behaves wildly. It takes a lot of experience and time to master the physics of the game. Very easy to pick up and play but very hard to master. Even when you have mastered it, the matches are still very unpredictable because you are playing against real human beings who are probably as good as you. Rocket League forces you to take many things into account: angle and force of impact on the ball, timing and direction to jump and hit the ball, positioning of your team mates, intelligent centering to create play opportunities for your team, physical blocking and disrupting of opponent players. FIFA 16 do not demand any of these skills in its game at such a high level as rocket league demands.

A match between high profile teams in FIFA 16 can be fast paced and a lot of fun. But most of the time, you spend a lot of dribbling and defending like in real football. Rocket League pacing is completely different. It is fast paced adrenaline rush all the time mainly because the cars are fast and everyone is trying to hit the ball like madmen. There are no penalties like yellow or red cards in rocket league to take you out of the action. You use everything in your power to score. If the game allows it in gameplay, it’s legal. FIFA 16 is inferior in providing that feeling.

The lesson to learn from Rocket League is that even with vastly fewer resources, rocket league pioneered an innovative gameplay that the players can’t find anywhere else. This is why it has achieved similar levels of success compare to FIFA 16. In the anti-rival industries, don’t compete on values that established businesses have already perfected. Instead invent a new one or become superior in values the established companies are particularly weak at. For example, Indigogo search engine was able to take some market shares from Google because it emphasizes on privacy and security which are two values google is particularly weak at. This is how you are going to succeed in an anti-rival industry.

How to succeed in an anti-rival market?

© PEL COnsulting

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