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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4936759" data-attributes="member: 15538">Presumably, the smart thing for SPI to do in this situation would be to license out some of their hot properties to competent computer game companies to get a share of the cash while it's flowing. In the mean time, in house they look at new directions in game design, redesign products that don't make money to make better use of their resources, and look at ways to produce a game that will sell to a young audience. Down the road, they can license a successful computer game in order to produce their own hex and counter game based on it, tapping into an existing market. I think a lot of game hobbies flourish when brilliant designers have access to lots of capital. Later, when major brands are being run by more mediorce designers or by "the suits", things bump along until cash flow problems, unrelated or not, sink the ship. The Suits need to keep tight control of what resources are going in and looking at what comes out. In a situation where they are peddling brilliance and have room to allocate resources to different projects, this is great. In situations where they are selling not-so-great projects or the best projects are starved for design resources, the customer base goes into a death-spiral. When your market shrinks, you shrink your staff and operating costs down to what it takes to keep turning out the good stuff, but not to less than that. It's like GM. It's not that people don't drive cars any more. It's just that you had a bunch of guys trying their hardest to sell cars that hadn't changed a lot in a long time, weren't brilliantly designed, were compromised every step of the way by a cost-cutting mindset, and in many cases were sold to devoted but decidedly niche segments. I mean, heck, I still occasionally look for reasonably priced, exciting-looking hex games that can be played in under 6 hours. I just haven't seen too many lately, and I don't know where to shop for the small press items. If I saw people raving about it in the non-RPG sections of my favorite RPG sites, I would definitely check it out.</blockquote>

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