These "experiences" like flying like Peter Pan absolutely exist now, things like bungee jumping or hang gliding or ziplines. Most tourist areas and theme parks have lots of upcharge attractions of this sort. The scarcity of their limited capacity drives prices up. (Remember, in capitalism, prices are set by supply and demand, not by cost.)
This sort of service-intensive experience requires a large density of premium customers to justify going for that over a more mass-market entertainment approach. Indeed, theme parks themselves are moving more and more towards the theater model, because that scales so much better with much more capacity. Disney and Six Flags and Universal have upgraded many parks with huge theaters and shows. The best roller coasters and dark rides can run around 2,000 guests per hour; a theater show can hold 5,000 or more with minimal line-waiting.
Just like software, a capitalist can duplicate the movie experience for thousands of watchers at nearly no marginal cost. Compare that to a Broadway play which requires a hundred paid workers to stage a more personal performance. Broadway does exist thanks to New York's density of wealth, but that's the exception. Every town has a movie theater, because the pricing fits into everybody's everyday budget, and the physical hardware is easily constantly repurposed to a new movie.
Sure, but the original article is talking expressly about immersive experiences. A line of people waiting to crawl through a laser-tripwire room is the only economically feasible way to scale what he's talking about, but it's expressly not what he's talking about. That's what I was trying to get at.
You can build it. But it's dubiously economical (or incredibly expensive) unless you start stripping away at the immersion to streamline it.
This sort of service-intensive experience requires a large density of premium customers to justify going for that over a more mass-market entertainment approach. Indeed, theme parks themselves are moving more and more towards the theater model, because that scales so much better with much more capacity. Disney and Six Flags and Universal have upgraded many parks with huge theaters and shows. The best roller coasters and dark rides can run around 2,000 guests per hour; a theater show can hold 5,000 or more with minimal line-waiting.
Just like software, a capitalist can duplicate the movie experience for thousands of watchers at nearly no marginal cost. Compare that to a Broadway play which requires a hundred paid workers to stage a more personal performance. Broadway does exist thanks to New York's density of wealth, but that's the exception. Every town has a movie theater, because the pricing fits into everybody's everyday budget, and the physical hardware is easily constantly repurposed to a new movie.