Quote:
Originally Posted by Malleus Dei
Your market really isn't fantasy baseball players. I know a large group of them, and none of them have shown any long-term interest in OOTP or even BM or a console game. They like the ties to real baseball too much.
The console audience is lost from the start.
So what you are left with are hard-core baseball gamers and hard-core strategy gamers (and calling that audience "geeks" is demeaning, Steve, many of them are not geeks). There's your potential customer base: people who like extremely complicated baseball strategy games and people who like extremely complicated strategy games of any kind and who will play a baseball game - or, for another example, a soccer game - even though they are not baseball or soccer fans, but simply because the game is rich, detailed, offers numerous opportunities for significant decisions and rewards good decision-making.
Therefore you guys need to be selling OOTP as two things:
1. The most complex computer baseball game of all. Get some kind of slick advertising phrase behind that to tie to the game, like "OOTP, the king of baseball computer games" only better.
2. A complex and feature-rich strategy game. Puresim forged a relationship with Matrix Games, one of the biggest online marketers of strategy games, which helped sell games to new customers; maybe you should look in to affiliating yourself to either them or, say, Shrapnel Games or such, as that will get you strategy gamer eyes on your product. Or find some other way to do that.
But going after fantasy gamers will not pay off. They don't do and don't want to do complicated games like OOTP.
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FWIW, I agree with much of this. In order for fantasy league fans (and their group of friends) to switch to playing OOTP instead (and I think it would have to be a switch), it would be because there is something unsatisfying to them about their fantasy leagues. No evidence of that.
OTOH, hard-core sim fans are
ALWAYS dissatisfied to some extent, so they will be more likely to try OOTP to see if it's better than whatever they're playing now. And when they look at the forums and see just how
interesting the complaints are, they're likely to stick with it. At least that's what happened to me.
