Thinking on potential write-ins we could do to compete in the Franchise Wars. A lot of them are 'pie in the sky' kind of thing and won't be done anytime soon, so I'm just spitballing here:
1) WALL-E'S DELIVERY SERVICE
Using Diecast Robotics to deliver food to people's homes. Think DoorDash, but not horribly exploitative and done by cute robots - we'll probably have to do something about AI before rolling them out, but the WALL-E model will be really popular with customers on account of them being durable and adorable buggers.
IRL what prevents robots from being used en masse for these purposes is:
a) high cost of mass production
b) shit decision-making when not handheld by human operators
c) need for constant maintenance on account of mechanical complexity
Diecast Robotics bypasses every single one of these problems - they're cheap, simple in construction and can operate on their own even without possessing sapience. Food delivery market is an untapped goldmine for urban centers (as many have seen IRL during the Covid lockdowns) since getting food delivered to your home is pretty convenient - so if we can bypass the cancer that is gig economy, we shall beat a lot of our competition to the punch by offering a mass-scale delivery service no one really has a counter to.
2)
DIGITAL CUISINE
Using Digitizer Codes to streamline the logistics of our food production. I don't know if it
can be done on a required scale, we need to clarify the specifics of how SHV laser works in action - but theoretically if you put a dish in the digital world, you can press CTRL+V on it when you need a copy and have it ready instantly.
For the purposes of mass production, it will save us a
fortune when it comes to storage, preservation and transportation - we can ignore dates of expiration altogether, we save on physical space and logistical capacity that would be occupied by warehouses/production facilities/moving the goods, and it allows for easy expansion because we just need to set up a SHV laser to produce food en masse. We create a single logistics hub with the SHV, have it produce the dish and have the personnel move it where it should be.
It protects us from sabotage, too; even if our competition gets our hands on the SHV laser, without algorithms it's nothing more than a laser pointer. The only ones who can contest this front of Franchise Wars is ENCOM, who do not appear to be interested, and every other megacorp has no presense in the digital world.
3) SPLIT/SECOND
It makes more sense than it seems.
The lifeblood of a successful franchise is advertisement. It's not enough to simply exist - you must shove yourself in people's faces, constantly being visible, presenting yourself as something they want and something they need. And as it happens, ad industry is what keeps the entertainment industry running a lot of the time. There are entire shows created purely to advertize a given product, but even disregarding those, a significant portion of revenue for TV networks and movie studios comes from commercial breaks and product placement.
Obviously, it goes the other way too. Entertainment is one of the most effective vehicles (heh) to advertize your product, because ads appeal to the lizard part of our brains that associates the product with cool things on the screen. SPLIT/SECOND is the perfect means to introduce our burgeoning food franchises to the masses in an exciting and appealing way.
Besides. Every live event makes most of its money on snacks.
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@Arathnorn I understand the first two options are unavailable right now, but you could clarify if they're theoretically
possible to do as envisioned here? Maybe give an approximate DC for implementing them?
