wdolson
Posts: 10398
Joined: 6/28/2006
From: Near Portland, OR
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58
Not trying to start yet another b-fest, but as I look at their recent mega-offerings I see one modern $100 game with a huge number of fixes in motion, another decade-in-development monster that shipped with no AI and a score of optional features greyed out on the load screen and a statement many would never be finished, and a 4X game shipped in alpha state with a "help us fund this unfinished product" pitch to real-life retail buyers. AE2 has a built in, massive buyer base and could sustain a $150 price point and not break a sweat. They're pretty bad at game publishing if they're not always, every month, talking about doing this project.
For a wargame, the fan base is very large for the WitP family. For a game, no wargame has a large market. Releases of video games like Grand Theft Auto and the other games you see on TV ads can sell more than 1 million copies in a few months after release. The best selling wargames (true wargames, not abstractions like Risk) have sold about 10,000 copies over their entire lifetime. Some mega hits like ASL sold maybe a little better than that, but probably less than 100,000 copies.
This is a niche market Slitherine/Matrix do a lot to dominate it like Avalon Hill did back in the days of board games. But it's still a niche.
When Avalon Hill sold out to Hasbro i read a very good analysis of the gaming market. Everyone who was an insider in the industry was scratching their head why Hasbro would be interested. Hasbro's worst seller game sold more in a year than Avalon Hill's best selling games did over their entire lifetime. In the end it was concluded that Hasbro had intentions of making multi-player online versions of some of AH's multi-player games like Diplomacy, but that never really happened. In the end it just prevented anyone else from doing it.
Hasbro buying AH though was akin to McDonalds expanding into Mexican food by buying out a tiny chain of Mexican taquarias as their new division.
I'm sure Matrix has made some decent money off of AE. I'm not privy to any of the financials, that is just my guess. It's probably one of the most popular computer wargames in history, but it's down in the noise compared to the big hitters. I doubt the typical fan of the latest style of computer games is going to have the patience to play a game like AE, or even an AE2 with a new engine. This topic does not lend itself to being a real time game. It's a very cerebral game that takes a lot of study.
When the Myers Briggs went around a few years ago, I noted that the majority of people who participated in the thread were INTJ with most of the rest being somewhat close in type. INTJ is the rarest of the 16 types and all the other types I saw were also rare. A group made up of rare types are probably never going to convince the rest of the herd that whatever they are into is interesting.
As an aside the type demographics here are very similar to the type demographics in Mensa which is around 24% INTJ and 16% INTP.
Bill
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WitP AE - Test team lead, programmer  |
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