Erik Rutins
Posts: 37503
Joined: 3/28/2000 From: Vermont, USA Status: offline
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Grogmaster, We pretty much completely disagree. Your posts are filled with assertions without facts behind them and are overwhelmingly negative. It's obvious you have a personal dislike for some people in the company and you are unable to be objective about the company as a whole because of that. I'll try to engage some of your comments though, but if this goes nowhere don't expect another reply. If by "forcing the market to be niche with high prices" you mean that after trying many different price levels and models early in our history we settled on the one that seemed to work best to keep us and our developers in business, then I might agree. Our philosophy is that the wargame market is better off with its developers in business rather than not. However, we can't force that on anyone. You can choose to purchase or not and whether to purchase when a title is on sale or not. If our model does not work, a competitor with a different model will eventually replace us. If by "plumping out the most titles in the quickest amount of time" you mean sticking with games and developers that have been in progress for years, in an effort to get a highly anticipated game finished after other publishers would have given up, I might agree. If you meant that we were trying to give every promising developer that was interested in making wargames an actual chance at success even if other publishers would not, then I might agree. I think you'd have to be part of the internal process to see how much work and effort we put into these games from our side and how few of them would have seen the light of day or been in the shape they ended up in without the support of a similar publisher. Our developers do an incredible job and put their hearts into these games, but it's the partnership between us that really gives them the best chance to release within a reasonable timeframe and to meet customer expectations. If by "swallowing up competitors" you mean "keeping them from going out of business" then I might agree. If a good developer or publisher approaches us looking for a better solution, or we see one that's struggling, we'd rather give it our best shot using what we know to try to make them successful. That often works, but sometimes does not. If we see a great title and we'd like to publish it, we will certainly talk to those developers and give them an offer of what we can do. You mentioned Close Combat. Here's a series that was approaching extinction. The only way you could even get a copy was to pay over $100 on E-Bay and the odds were it would not work with your current operating system. The owner of the brand was not doing anything with it and had no future plans. We negotiated on behalf of wargamers and paid to get that license. Even then, it was just opening the door a bit. We were allowed to work with the existing engine and update and remake the original releases. That's also what many in the community wanted, so we focused on that. It was only a year ago that we finally managed to buy the rights to Close Combat outright. Panthers in the Fog was the first result, but it's not our end goal. As you may know, the result of finally getting ownership meant that we immediately started work on a new 3D Close Combat engine. We've invested our money and time into that. We didn't want to keep the community waiting with no Close Combat releases while that was in progress though, so we also continued to work on the existing engine and updated it to create the first non-remake, Panthers in the Fog. We are not a monopoly, nor are we trying to harm the wargaming community. We're doing our best to do the opposite. I would argue that we've released and funded many landmark computer wargames that are the best of their kind, period and set the benchmark for their subject matter and likely will for years to come. We've given the best developers a home and many of them have done their best work here and most are still with us after 10+ years which speaks to their experience. As for the people above me on the totem pole, I'm one of the founders and one of the Directors of the company, of which there are five. Based on your previous replies, I assume you are referencing Iain. Iain is also a wargamer and works on these games because he personally enjoys them. His personal history includes competitive tournament tabletop wargaming as well as computer wargaming. He and his father, JD are a wargaming family. Again, I don't know where your assertions come from but as far as I can tell they are without basis. Also, as far as I can tell RPS was not "sniffing out greed" but rather giving us their advice on what would work better as a pricing strategy to make even more money and attract more customers. We may disagree on some of the specifics, but advice like that is always appreciated if not always agreed with. Apparently you think we are both greedy and yet unwilling to take advice that would make us more money? Or we're just greedy and stupid, which is I guess your real stance. As I said to Rogo, please consider if you are actually advancing the discussion now in any constructive way, or simply using it to vent some kind of personal grievance. It looks much more like the latter to me. Regards, - Erik
< Message edited by Erik Rutins -- 4/28/2013 10:38:30 PM >
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