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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8426489" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Indeed. Why are McDonald's burgers or chicken nuggets some of the most eaten foods on Earth? Why is Budweiser the most consumed beer in America (producing some 90 million barrels per year in the United States alone in 2020)?It's not because these things are incredible achievements of their crafts (they aren't, though there is challenge in being so uniformly consistent), nor because they have some ultra-secret property that makes them utterly unique in their classes (they don't; consider that KFC prizes its secret spices so much, but isn't as big as McDonald's chicken nuggets). There's a huge variety of reasons why they're actually not super ideal options in one way or another. The factors that make them big are, often, only tangentially related to the specific details of the product itself.Similarly, even for something that genuinely has significant meritorious qualities, being a bestseller or the most widely used X or whatever can be almost entirely dependent on external factors. The Bible is, and remains, the single most-published book ever, with over 5 billion copies sold or distributed--and other likewise deeply ideological books (the Quran, the Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong aka the Little Red Book). Or a book can simply be extremely old. Sun Tzu's The Art of War is an ancient text, and has thus simply had an enormous amount of time to get around--it absolutely deserves the accolades it's gotten, but "it's existed for an extremely long time" can easily shape whether something qualifies for a "top dog" position or not.These confounding variables make it really difficult to discuss the success of a thing in isolation, separate from utterly unrelated external factors. E.g., I think Star Wars Episode IV is an excellent (if very tropey) film, but a big part of its success in 1977 was that it offered an aspirational, positive message in a time when cinema had kinda ground down pretty deep in dark and brooding stuff (consider Dirty Harry or The Godfather I and II). The Vietnam War had only ended two years previously, and the Watergate scandal was still quite fresh in the public consciousness (72-74). A New Hope was, in a very real sense, exactly what it said on the tin--and while it probably would have been successful no matter what due to its timeless-classic elements (as stated, it's very tropey), the context in which it occurred was critical to its success, and Lucas' own success was him hitting on the notion that merchandising was the future of money in cinema, an idea that has since become almost comically overwrought today.Nothing that succeeds does so in a vacuum, and sometimes, the winner really does win purely because they coincidentally got there first.Edit: Consider strategy games like Civilization. If you succeed early, that means you're stronger in the mid-game, which makes you more likely to succeed again. And each time you succeed again, you make it even more likely that you'll succeed another time. The "snowball" can be an incredibly powerful force, where even if you make a bunch of mistakes all throughout the game, getting really lucky right at the start can make a huge difference across the entire rest of the game. (It's a thorny and serious design problem with such games: how do you make the early game matter, but not matter so much that the late game just becomes cleanup?)</blockquote>

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