rtrapasso
Posts: 22653
Joined: 9/3/2002 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980 quote:
ORIGINAL: khelvan quote:
ORIGINAL: ZOOMIE1980 Not sure what your basis of fact here is. EA-Sports, Microsoft, Legend Entertainiment, etc have put out very complex titles that don't cost as much as WitP does. They all have marketing staffs and are organized along the lines of a standard software firm. Just because a firm is organized more along traditional business lines, does not in any way mean it will automatically charge more for its products. In fact, it is just as likely they could charge LESS as their resources are better fitted to the operational requirements of the enterprise. I work for a firm of roughly 50 people. We have no "QC department", no dedicated Customer Support group, no Finance Department, no Purchasing Department or anything else. What we DO have is a marketing chairman, a single salesman, two marketing assistants, and about a half dozen senior project managers and few junior/assistant managers, one R&D guy (me) along with about 35 developers/engineers (techies of various levels and skill sets). The marketing guys and one project manager are the guys that go to the shows along with whatever techie is on the least critical path. Occassionally one of the three partners MIGHT go to one. When I first started we had 18 people. Three partners, two project managers, and 13 developers. We still went to trade shows, but even then, never took more than one techie. Comparing the computer game industry to mainstream software development is a faulty analogy. The computer game industry is at its heart much more akin to the entertainment industry, such as motion pictures or to a lesser extent the music industry. Software development is a tool for the game industry, not the end result. As someone in the software development business you don't have the same frame of reference so your evaluation of Matrix/2by3 will be way off. EA, Microsoft, Legend, these are to computer gaming as 20th Century Fox is to motion pictures. Big budgets, big projects, mass market appeal. Matrix/2by3 are like the publisher and studio for small documentary films. To compare them is fallacious at best. Raising the awareness level for Matrix products is complex, due to the nature of the buyer. Simply hiring a pretty woman to sit in the booth and attract pimply-faced teenagers may work for a developer of mainstream RTS or FPS games, but Matrix's market is too savvy for that. I bought over $100 worth of software at GenCon from Matrix because I was turned on by small, ugly looking unit graphics on a big screen with a knowledgeable Matrix employee there to stoke the grognard fire, not by seeing huge mammary glands. Had I not seen Matrix's booth at GenCon, I may very well have never had the fortune to find out about WitP. I don't mean this as condescending, but if you want to be taken seriously I suggest you study the business model of the company you are talking about, within the context of the industry, before making critical comments. Matrix and 2by3 seem to be doing remarkable jobs in a very tough industry reaching a niche market where it is difficult for companies to survive. I have worked in both mainstream software development and the computer game industries, and I have an MBA, so feel free to accept what I say, not accept it, or better yet do some more research before making such blanket statements. Cheers, -khel Again, I don't give a DAMN if Matrix is just THREE people. YOu don't send ALL THREE to trade show with distributable product ready to go needing only installation bundling done.... AGain, HOW MANY does it REALLY take at a trade show to man the booth and maybe take in a seminar or two???? The whole damned critical mass of the company??? Still not buying.... Shoot, in some places I know of, they shut down entire factories for 1 week - 2 weeks at a go, and NO ONE is there, and they employ 100s to 1000s of folk. They figure it is more efficient to have everyone off at once then to try to schedule around everyone's vacation. They have a heck of a lot more resources than Matrix/2 x 3. I will agree that they are not software companies, but large scale manufacturers.
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