pasternakski
Posts: 6565
Joined: 6/29/2002 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Veldor So just play the games and have fun. Veldor, I agree with you on most things, and find your commentary useful (and this post's remarks about the utility of hexes is right on the money) - except it's here where we part company. I don't have time to play all the games. Most people can't afford to buy them all. There's junk out there. I want good designers to produce good games. Some take it seriously. Some don't. Some deserve to survive (that is, be supported by the buying public). Some don't. I want to see a good shakeout through a healthy marketplace "natural selection" process. For example, that silly Polish vaporware site purporting to be the front for a new strategic WWII Pacific game that looks like an embellishment of Empire Deluxe needs to go away. A lot of the junk Matrix has picked up needs to get lost. Let's have some improvement in areas and ways that will create demand among the buying public - and let's get serious about marketing. I have never been persuaded that wargames cannot appeal to a mass market. The right designs in the right hands can make a lot of money. This new American Revolution game that's due out in January is intriguing. It doesn't appear to have a lot of innovative game mechanics or graphics, but it looks really nice on the screen. Problem is, it's not going to get the kind of marketing juice that was behind Civ, SimCity, and most of the other highly successful (in terms of sales) series of games out there. One surprise winner is GalCiv. I don't have a lot of the answers, but it seems to me that designers, developers, and marketers can learn from what has succeeded in non-wargaming contexts and bring, if not the same sales numbers, at least significant improvement, to mainstream wargaming. I'd like to see that. I don't want more mediocre games that sell maybe 5,000 copies, leaving everyone shrugging their shoulders, wringing their hands, and saying, "Well, it's just the nature of the market. It's a niche. There's nothing we can do." I can't agree that it's just a matter of the entire bunch of computer wargamers in the world throwing money at every title that makes an appearance. This "Mad Minute" thing provides an example of how uninterested I can be as a consumer. What's it got going for it? What innovations and improvements over "let's throw together a bunch of code and see what happens" are there? Where's the beef (apologies to Clara Peller and George Herbert Walker Bush). I just can't get it up over this (and while you're killing off that third woman, the other two and I will be out behind the barn having a good old time).
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Put my faith in the people And the people let me down. So, I turned the other way, And I carry on anyhow.
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