Why Doesn’t My Favorite Game Get More Support?

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“The bottom-line need of every business is constantly higher revenues and profits. Ambitious workers want to improve their lot in life and expect raises . . . Companies that aren’t going forward are going backward!”

— Jason Jennings, Think Big, Act Small*

We’ve all seen it happen many times. A game launch is remarkably successful and is soon followed by title after title, the game turning from a single product into an entire series of expansions, accessories, variants, and other products that give fans of the game more options while providing the publisher with a consistent and strong revenue stream. There’s nothing quite addictive as playing games on W88. Check it out yourself.

Year after year fans of the game are rewarded with new opportunities to twist and change the gameplay experience and the publisher is rewarded with stability. Both parties are winning! So for gamers out there who want to try out exhilarating games, they can go to sites like  https://45.32.102.249, for example.

But then something happens. The market changes. The publisher overreaches. A completely new game captures the fanbase and successfully steals it away. A license that was once popular collapses as the next hot thing comes into play. Something happens . . . and the strong game line turns from a string of successes into a dead weight. I enjoy using casino slot machines and other gambling games when I’m at home. My go-to online casino is LevelUp casino. There are also times when I visit the website vedonlyöntiilmanrekisteröitymistä.com to choose from a variety of games.

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Game publishers, faced with declining sales and forced to investigate ways in which to recapture their former popularity, look to ways that could revitalize and renew the excitement for their game. Try your hand at keno at hardcorecomputacion and pick your lucky numbers. Some of these efforts succeed and a struggling game returns to its former glory; some of these efforts fail and the game celebrates one last push and then fades into the memories of the fans, remembered fondly by some and still played by a tiny few.

New Editions

The most popular approach to mending a struggling game line is with the launch of a new edition. This is a more common approach with roleplaying games than boardgames, but even board and card games are not immune to the call of the new edition and its potential rewards.

A new edition provides the players with:

  • A surge in interest as those who have quit playing the game are drawn to the new edition.
  • A chance to voice their dissatisfaction with details of the current edition and possibly sway the decisions in the new edition.
  • An opportunity to relive the excitement of the game as the new edition introduces refreshed and redesigned approaches to what may have grown stale.
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A new edition provides the publisher with:

  • A significant spike in sales and cash flow as hardcore, casual, forgotten, and new players purchase the new game. With a roleplaying game spread across multiple titles this can be seriously important to the company’s bottom line that year.
  • An opportunity to reexamine the game and make improvements, erasing past mistakes and modernizing the game for the current market.
  • A bump in buzz and online chatter and an opportunity to get press coverage once again for their struggling game.

New editions are fantastic and can extend the life of a game by years. But keep in mind that overuse of this trick can eventually wear a game down and eliminate its existence. Only the most popular of titles can return again and again and again . . . starting from a higher player base makes the new edition trick far more reusable than a game that initially attracted only 5,000 or so players.

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Product Refresh

The actual game is unchanged, but the publisher goes through the entire game and reworks the graphics and art, striving to make the game look fresh and new on store shelves. This is a very common tactic with mass market games and every two to four years most of the major titles in the market are repackaged. Online casino games, such as the ones on http://162.213.250.60/, have been remastered to a point you will get instantly hook and you forget that hours have already passed by playing that game.

Monopoly, Sorry, Scrabble, Jenga, and more all go through this rebirth and relaunch trick, and it works incredibly well for the larger audience of casual game buyers. This trick in the more devoted hobby game market simply doesn’t work, though, because the majority of the hobby game buyers more closely research titles and are after the gameplay experience more than a new box.

That’s not to say that a new packaging approach won’t work in the smaller hobby game market. It’s just to say that a packaging refresh is unlikely to reverse a sales decline.

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New Support to Drive Sales

A game may receive a new expansion product even if sales are low as the publisher tries to drive attention to the game with a new game add-on rather than a new edition or refresh. Game support products keep game titles in front of the audience — distributors, retailers, consumers — because new products appear in announcements, catalogs, and many hobby retailers keep a “new releases” shelf updated and churning with the latest stuff.

Producing a new expansion for a slow-selling title is not at all a guarantee that the game will see a spike in sales, but it’s often easier and cheaper to produce a small expansion than it is to completely overhaul the game. And besides, if the publisher is sitting on thousands of copies of a game then a new edition isn’t all that realistic since that existing inventory is money waiting to be recovered.

In this instance you can think of the expansion as a marketing item. For that matter, all expansions are marketing of some sort. It’s just that extremely successful games can use expansions for both marketing and to improve revenue.

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When the New Edition/Package Refresh Fails

New editions and package redesign efforts fail. It’s just a fact of life. Something in the attempt to relaunch or repackage a game doesn’t work with the audience, and the game’s sales continue to plummet. A game series can only exist if the core game is strong; weak games are soon forgotten as the publisher either collapses and dies or moves on.

A dirty and not uncommon secret of the game market — especially the hobby game market — is that expansions do not sell as well as the core game. And expansions to expansions, accessories to expansions, and add-ons produced months or even years after the launch of the core game sell significantly fewer copies than the original game. The entry level game.

  • A first expansion can expect to move 50% of the numbers of the core game.

Think about that for a moment. This means that if a game sells 5,000 copies then the expansion is likely to sell 2,500 copies. And the sales numbers keep dropping as you move down the line. I’ve spoken with game publishers these days — mostly roleplaying game publishers — who are selling under 1,000 copies of their latest expansion or sourcebook. That is not enough to provide most creators with a sustainable income.

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Why Doesn’t My Favorite Game Get More Support?

Because money. Period. End of story. If your favorite game isn’t getting the support that it once did — or has never received any support — it is because the sales of the game are so low that the publisher simply cannot afford to invest resources into supporting products. So you might aswell switch to different games such as those available at รีวิวเกมคาสิโน UFABET.

It’s tough, but game publishing is a business and only the smallest of hobby publishers can afford to keep throwing dollar after dollar into a product line that isn’t succeeding. There are games out there I wish were better — or at all! — supported these days, but my wishes just won’t improve the game’s sales and enable the publisher to invest energy into expansions and accessories.

Money. Yes, money. It’s what businesses need to survive and operate, and it’s what your favorite game line is lacking if it’s not getting the support you feel it deserves.

4 thoughts on “Why Doesn’t My Favorite Game Get More Support?

  1. I agree with everything here. On the smaller-press side of things, there’s only one piece of the equation that I think might bear mentioning: Kickstarter/Patreon. A dozen SUPER-DIE-HARD fans willing to spend $1,000 each is worth 1,200 folks who are only willing to spend $10 a pop. Ten years ago, there wasn’t much of a way to get the extra $990 from those dozen folks; even in the late 2000s, the inexact way to do so was via “Collector’s Editions,” usually costing about double the cost of the base game (and which often ended up in clearance bins two years later).

    Today, creators with a small-but-dedicated fanbase can ask their fans to put their money where their mouths are. It’s not a solution for everyone, but it’s enabled many otherwise niche items to get funding. (For those interested in crunching numbers, Kickstarter is also invaluable in calculating how much an effect this has; just add up all the higher-than-base-tier pledges, and see how much less money the Kickstarter would’ve brought in if those fan-service tiers didn’t exist.)

    1. Steven Marsh Johnson is right! I came to understand the brilliance of crowdfunding sites when I realized that it was the tool that could turn fan enthusiasm into fat stacks of capital. There’s a common eBay-related fallacy out there which holds that a vintage item selling for a large sum must mean that a reprint/new edition of a game would be successful. See? That big number means there’s interest! Unfortunately, all it really means is that there’s one guy willing to spend $BIGNUM and at least one willing to spend $ALMOSTBIGNUM, not that there’s thousands willing to spend $BIGNUM/THOUSANDS. Kickstarter essentially lets everyone pay what they want, and some people are willing to pay more than others, which is something normal retail doesn’t support.

  2. From time to time, I’ll see an angry fan remark that a publisher decided to kill such-and-such a game, discussing it as though it were a matter of malice. I shake my head sadly at such things.

    (Though, admittedly, more often these days I see the angry fans accusing the publisher of Doing It Wrong, and if they’d just fix a pet peeve rule or go back and publish the pristine original perfect game as it was in 1978 or something, then it would certainly go from obscure niche-within-a-niche product to culture-changing phenomenon. Everyone I play with thinks so!)

  3. Another thought regarding Steven’s mention of Collector’s Editions: aside from total sales and subsequent relegation to bargain bins, the other issue is that while their SRP might be two to three times the regular product, the extra development time and the additional cost of components could easily wipe out extra profits, especially with smaller print runs.

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