Joel Billings
Posts: 32265
Joined: 9/20/2000
From: Santa Rosa, CA
Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: charlie0311
Joel, et al.
You say Wite is "niche" market, well and good. Is a BMW (car) niche market? Answer yes. Mass market is stuff like paper towels,etc.
As far as the gaming market goes the more successful games are intuitive, read that, easy to play. They are more fun because they are easy.
I bought this game early Dec, maybe a week ago i finally found the post that directed me to the updated manual. You had it well hidden in the game files/folders. You also sent me an out of date, and incomplete manual, and i paid for this. Are you guys trying to destroy what market you already have?
If you guys think your product is so complex that it can't be intuitive, then you are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! You're wrong.
There was a real smart guy once, Robert McNamara, so smart he had fixed Ford motor company. He was in charge of the Vietnam war. He was so smart he was mentally ill, ie couldn't see his own errors. He was good at making up excuses. Kind of like the Kieynsian (sp) economists of our present day.
There is a saying in naval engineering that says you have to make things "sailor proof". That means intuitive these days. No complexity in weapons systems, ya think? Well, do ya?
Related notes
1) the American civil war is a large part of the wargaming market. Therefore wite products should have a similar market in europe especially with the emerging middle class (more money and leisure time) in the old soviet union and satelites (sp,again). Ask Pavel about this.
2) my latest "can't figure" item. Playing as sov (first time). There is something about withdrawing to be reorganized for tank and motorized divs. I see something like 20% chance to withdraw if routed. Is that for the whole war? If never routed do they just stay for the whole war. should be if one gets routed then all have 20% chance each turn, max, two per turn (or three). And all go by end of 41.
Don't release witw until its a lot more intuitive. Tell the beta testers "we're going intuitive". Also tell them, "we know you guys are really smart and can "figure it out", great, but what we want is a product that is so intuitive that a monkey can play it, use your smarts that way"
Finally. What do you think the guys doing smart phones and apps are doing? Multiple choice 1) saying things like "our stuff is so complex and niche market that it can't be intuitive" or 2) the obvious answer.
charlie
I do appreciate your feedback.
First, comparing computer monster games to BMW's as both being niche is a little extreme (my daughter would like to have a BMW as would many 21 year old's, few want a computer monster wargame - my favorite econ professor always said that there was a shortage of BMW's because he wanted to buy a new one for $1000 and no matter how hard he looked he couldn't find one - but I'm getting off track here).
What we have here is mostly a question of limited resources versus the return (or lack of it) to be had by trying to apply more resources. Then you add in the issue of bugs and the fact that complex games like this require a lot of post production work to improve on game balance (and fix bugs) once lots of players start playing the game. I could be wrong, but I've been in this business since 1979, and monster wargames (of which WitE is one) are by their very nature niche products. Making things more intuitive, adding on screen information and tutorials, and providing a constantly up to date manual would all be great. But they all take time. A lot of what gets done on our games is done by volunteers, because frankly there isn't enough money in these games to pay people for their time. We wouldn't have an updated manual if it weren't for Leo, a volunteer. I agree we could do a better job of making it clear that this updated manual is available. I see it is on the auto run menu that comes up. I'd really like to hear suggestions on what we can do to better point players to the updated manual.
John Young has done a lot of work creating a player's handbook and one page guides for WitW. We're lucky that John is interested enough to do this. The bootcamp tutorial for WitE was also written by volunteers. In theory documentation is fairly easy to produce if you have someone willing to work on it (although it still takes programmer time if the person documenting can't read the code). Actually adding things into the game code is another issue entirely. Of course it's always possible if you find a volunteer, but then you have to deal with integrating that person's code into the game, testing the code, etc. That all adds overhead and slows down the main coding work.
If we decided to "go intuitive" for WitW, you could add another year (or more) to development (and it's already way behind our original hoped for schedule). How intuitive would be intuitive enough? Would we really get that many more sales because of it? As much as I would like to say yes, I believe the answer is no.
You mention the market in the rest of the world. Well there's a good point there re localization. We localized WitE for the German market. This required a lot of time and effort by our programmers, especially our tech programmer who has very little time available for our projects. This got the game into the German market and increased the number of units sold (although since it went into retail, at much less revenue per sale). In the end was the time and effort worth it to us (and Matrix)? I can't speak for Matrix, but for us, it was marginally worth the time invested (covered our time, but probably not the opportunity costs of our time as it delayed future projects). Also, although the capability for localization to other languages existed, the product was deemed too niche to be localized. This was not the first time in my experience that localization proved to be a distraction and not really worth the time. You really need to have something that is as close to a mass market wargame as you can get (something like Panzer General) to make difficult localization really worthwhile. That's because there is a tradeoff you have to make when you set yourself up for ease of localization. For simpler games and especially games designed from day 1 with localization in mind, the tradeoff can be minimized. Not so for games like WitE.
My family plays a lot of board strategy games. Recently I've played a few on the IPad. I've been very impressed with their intuitiveness on the IPad. However, the games are not even 1/1000th as complex as WitE. What seem to be complex strategy games to the majority of the world are in fact very quick and simple games (especially when you take out all the dice rolling, card pulling, etc. that goes much faster on a computer). These games can be played by anyone willing to spend a few minutes to learn. WitE is not at all like these games, and no amount of on-screen help is going to change that. You won't find WitE on a smart phone. 
Now, if we were ever to produce a game like Gary's Steel Panthers, especially one on platforms other than the PC, I'd agree with you 100%, as that is a game like Panzer General that, if done right, can have much wider appeal. At the same time, I know it would take more people working on it than we have working on WitE/WitW.
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All understanding comes after the fact.
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