Or, alternately, you can gamble that elements that were sufficiently popular to attract a core of vocal fans who've stuck with it for over a decade might just be able to attract new fans.
Why? Game publishing is a business. As I noted earlier in this thread, faithfully obeying the desires of the fans has led to either crappy products or failed to really affect sales.
You suggest that a publisher use the following formulae:
I suggested the formula I actually suggested. Feel free to respond to it. The fact is that nothing excuses indiscriminate purchases.
What allows stuff you don't like to proliferate is mostly your willingness to buy said stuff. The fannish desire to have everything with a brand name first on the block, no matter its content, is a long term burden.
If you keep buying what you think is crap, I can't think of a single company that would be unwilling to continue to sell you said crap.
What's more, there's an economic incentive to cater to the die-hard fans if you assume two things: a willingness to continue the line or produce merchandise based on it, and a die-hard fanbase whose ideas are not completely out-of-whack with the general populace.
Actually:
1) Gamma World's "fanbase" looked pretty miniscule to me. I didn't see a preponderance of GW fanpages before any kind of adaptation. How many of you can name one off the top of your head, without googling? I also note that nobody here has really ever discussed GW's setting, either -- awfully curious for such a "die-hard" fanbase never to talk about anything specific about the game.
In reality, perhaps some folks should be honest with themselves, look back and realize that GW as a going concern has been primarily driven by company-end hype.
2) The "old school" vision of Gamma World many of you talk about was a recent invention. Yes, there was a "How Green is My Mutant" article in the Strategic Review. There were, by contrast, several attempts to dee-"Wahoo!" GW in Ares. One I remember offhand: An article on how to use genetic engineering to justify PSH's stats because they didn't make any sense otherwise. But wait -- genetic engineering is supposed to be Bad, and Not Gamma World, right? A pity nobody told the authors back in the 80s.
Considering the abysmal failure of Gamma World d20,I'd say that the general (gaming) populace didn't dig the new style - or the overall poor quality of the book. Unless one assumes the book was designed merely to ream the nostalgia crowd, in which case it should have catered to said crowd anyway, it's hard to imagine any way of describing it other than as a failure.
Considering what again? Oh -- you mean, "Considering that a dozen or guys on a few fora complain about GWD20 and I would like to think that has some sort of connection to economic reality."
It doesn't. Sorry.
In reality, Gamma World had a more successful run than most game books -- almost definitely more than Darwin's World, the perrenially-mentioned bridesmaid that "got it right." If SSS could run the books it did, it means that SSS sold enough to justify continued printings, which automatically puts its sales an order of magnitude above anything but a WotC offering.
Yep it still might suck, despite the fact that it sold well. But don't blame them -- you guys bought it, remember?
Omega World, on the other hand, was, by Erik Mona's own account (and I think he would know ), the most popular Polyhedron minigame. Whether it was accurate to the original Gamma World or not, it apparently catered to the vocal fanbase's concept of said original - and it apparently, lo and behold, clicked more with the general gaming populace than less faithful adaptations.
I'm having trouble parsing this, because you can't define how "faithful" GWD20 is compared to Omega World without making a claim about how faithful Omega World was in the first place.
Omega World was quite nice, but its relationship to Gamma World was pretty much like any tale about the "good old days" -- more grounded in sentiment than reality. Gamma World was a game without a central thesis and with a generally shoddy design where quick character death was easy to come by. Omega World is Jonothan Tweet's rather clever portrayal of how you actually played it -- since most of you were at most, 14 at the time, you played it with the feel of the cheeseball games people play when they're 14 or so.
Plus, Omega World was one of only a handful of rebooted minigames. And it's being compared to Spelljammer? Spelljammer's first incarnation bombed so badly it was left as fodder for Roger E. Moore's random jokes, making print because TSR printed pretty much anything.
), the most popular Polyhedron minigame. Whether it was accurate to the original Gamma World or not, it apparently catered to the vocal fanbase's concept of said original - and it apparently, lo and behold, clicked more with the general gaming populace than less faithful adaptations.
) but rather that tastes differ.
