Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4615106" data-attributes="member: 49613">Man, the corps sure do have you by the short and curlies, brother. They've actually convinced you that it's necessary to the survival of capitalism that you buy a deliberately gimped and inferior product. Someone in some marketing department somewhere deserves a raise. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Suppose a company did produce a game that had everything you want. Now, your tastes could be rarified in the extreme (in which case nothing will keep this from being a niche product), but let's assume that they're not so rarified. OK, you don't have to buy 50 splat books and monster manuals to finally get the stats for all the stuff you want to play with. So where does this group get their revenue stream? Well, they can sell their sterling product to other like-minded folks. Maybe the game will actually catch on and be really popular. Now, they can also sell adventures, settings, ancillary materials, etc., but let's even leave that aside. Let's just focus on the core product: a good core product can eventually take the market by storm and more and more people will buy it.There are two ways to go here: try to get a core product with a decent following and then sink your fangs into that following and drain it white. Or, make a core product that is so good and that you have so much confidence in that you keep expanding the customer base with that product's quality. I think the former is a cynical strategy.Now, it also goes to show why role playing games, which may never have the market of some more popular products (there are only so many nerds on a given inhabited planet), are better suited to a hobbyist-merchant model than a corporate model. Corporations aren't generally concerned about the long run, so even if your product will eventually take over the world market, a corp often cares only about the next few quarters or so (or the duration of a given exec's tenure, so it's sort of like Plato's Ship of State).Myself, I would advise any producer, hobbyist or corporate, to make the best product possible at all times. You'll always find something more to sell. If nothing else, the strength of your fantasy game will drive sales of your next trick, the space game (or whatever). You can always make a new product and let the quality of the previous work be your main salesman.</blockquote>

Verification