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The State of Things, January 2009
For those of you who missed the premise last year, this is where I sit down and explain to everyone who cares to read it how World Domination LLC has been doing over the last year, and what seems likely to happen over the next year. Other companies will do these for the sake of stockholders. Here, it's just for the curious really. So, first order of business. Let's just get this out of the way early. Last year sucked for WDLLC. A fairly open policy on sending out review copies of MvM lead to a number of copies essentially getting thrown away, and some bad calls on advertising options caused money to disappear with nothing to show for it in a more direct fashion. A rather important art commission somehow managed to completely fall through, a representative hitting GenCon backed out, and while the biggest event we did have a presence at (DragonCon) our webserver was hacked into oblivion that very weekend preventing people from checking things out and ordering games in the aftermath. On top of this, a rather interesting web based product was forced into a major delay, and the lingering massive production cost debt from MvM started growing thanks to the magic of nasty interest rates. The U.S. economy taking a nosedive didn't help either. So, to quote a favored line of mine, "Why did we suck? How can we not suck in the future?" To the former, the answer is, largely, bad luck. To the latter, we're going to be attempting to adapt to the times. Until we're back in the black, any big budget labor of love projects are going to be on ice. The next The Massive Vs. The Masses will not be out before 2010 at the earliest sadly, and for that matter Collision is going to be stuck in con demo purgatory for some time as well. Even a few high profit concepts may be tossed back onto the back burner to be perfectly honest at this point. Gamorzilla vs. The Army of course will remain readily available, since the nice plump inventory of first run copies sitting behind me as I type this are, quite frankly, the whole source of the problem here. Does this mean we're going to spend the next year twiddling our thumbs? No. For the coming year, we have the following goals, as a company: 1. Propagate awareness of our games, and the quality thereof. 2. Focus on games for people who are as broke as we are. 3. Dig our way out of debt so we can work on the big new shiny toys. The first of these goals, honestly, is the trickiest. I would be perfectly willing to travel all over the world and play each of my games with everyone with any interest in these sorts of things, but the cost of doing so is prohibitively high. This actually ties into another problem from the last year, where cons have a nasty habit of sending along invitations and overlooking our policy for these things, leaving me stuck behind a demo table for 2 days and having to pay $500 or so for the privilege. Speaking as the owner of the company, and designer of the game, I really am totally willing to spend the whole weekend working and crashing on some random person's couch, but someone has to cover the cost of whatever taxis, planes, trains or whatever I'm using to get there. So personal, from the creator demos, those are relatively rare, and don't cover a lot of area. Traditional advertising, I find, is a dead end. Does MvM have some gorgeous artwork to show off? Sure. Does seeing it in a little margin ad make anyone want to actually drop cold hard cash down to check it out? Not in my experience, no. Seeing the game played? Hearing about it from a trustworthy source? Those get the job done. Unfortunately, having the personal bias of having created the game makes it hard to consider me "a trustworthy source" but on the off chance you do, hey, it really is an extremely fun game with lasting appeal that I would gladly buy if I didn't own a copy already. What really has to happen is, people who do own the game, for that matter, people who have played the game, need to spread the word. Tell friends about it. Play it with them. Drag it along to cons and parties, get people to play it there. Set it up in coffee shops, play it there. Go find the entry on BoardGameGeek and write some impressions. Blog about it. Insert references to it into relative parts of the TVtropes wiki. You'll end up with more people to play it with, and hasten the arrival of other cool stuff from us. Everybody wins. This leads into our next little point. Who here has $60 to spend? I'm not seeing any hands, and that isn't necessarily because I probably don't have a secret surveillance device aimed at you as you read this. There's a chance you'd love to grab a copy of our nice shiny game and play it with everyone you know, but you can't afford to. Can't we throw you a bone? Why yes. Yes we can. All of our front-burner projects at the moment are either distributable as PDFs, or are proper, play it in your web browser (or maybe as a stand-alone downloadable deal) games. The only cost involved for us is the hundreds of hours of labor. When there's no shipping costs, or printing costs, or anything else like that, it means these upcoming games can have prices as low as "ten bucks" or "five bucks" or "free, but if you want to toss some cash our way we'd appreciate it." We don't plan to slack off on the quality for these either. The final problem to face down is that whole money issue. Hopefully, people paying for extremely cheap downloadable games will get the job done. Failing that, we'll have to resort to crazy gimmickry. Price drops may happen, or temporary sales at any rate. Now then, having bored you with all of that, let us leave you with some vague hints as to the nature of these games which may appear in the next year. A free, browser-based RPG, of the "you have X turns a day to wander around doing amusing things" nature. A full-on MMORPG, albeit of an unorthodox nature. A cooperative multiplayer strategy game. A proper, serious, pen-and-paper RPG (as well as more silly fluff games like Glistening Chests). A proper, sophisticated tabletop wargame where we actively avoid gouging you for a bunch of proprietary minis. A handy tool for playing any tabletop game over the internet, with as few headaches as possible. We're keeping things vague, but within a month or so, expect an update on at least one of these projects. Another plan for the coming year is to throw significantly more updates onto the main news page of the site, possibly even a podcast, or some Q&A feature. | |||
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