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Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 16:17:55 -0500
From: John Colagioia <JColagioia@csi.com>
Organization: No Conspiracy Here...
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Subject: Re: Making Money
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Paul de Valmency wrote:

> I agree, the trick to CMP surviving was better marketing of the titles it
> did have.  That said, from a business perspective, would the few titles it
> did have warrant a full-on advertising campaign?  I think not...it's catch
> 22 again...marketing is needed to succeed, but the goods have to be there to
> be marketed, but no-one produces the goods because there's no market, so
> marketing is required to create a market, but there are no goods to be...

Actually, I'm almost certain that a market outside of the readers of this
newsgroup exists.  In my "other other life" (i.e., not here, and not at my day
job), I'm an adjunct professor for the local university (Polytechnic--once
"Brooklyn Poly," if anybody cares), and I teach the programming languages course
at one of the "satellite" campuses.  When discussing object-oriented
programming, I often bring Inform in to cover certain concepts.

Well, doing that sparked a fairly significant discussion of "what ever happened
to those guys," and "where can we get more of these games."

I can't imagine that Long Island, NY is such a special part of the world that
20% of the graduate students have played Zork and remember it fondly.

Perhaps the problem is what population segment to target.  If I remember
correctly, originally, Infocom targetted people who would have the disposable
income to own a personal computer, and those people happened to be technical and
relatively literate people.  Maybe those would be the best people to target
again, but for different reasons?  Engineering trade journals, association
newsletters and so forth?


> One thought that occurred to me: Perhaps if CMP had managed to secure the
> publishing rights to Activision's text adventures, it may have generated
> enough interest outside of the If community to make itself viable?  I for
> one, an avid Infocom fan of old, happened upon the If community by pure
> accident, and was amazed, as well as extremely pleased, to find that text If
> was so alive (albeit 'underground').  I am sure that there are many others
> like me, who remember fondly the days of playing games by Brian Howarth,
> Level 9 and Scott Adams as well as those from Infocom.  This, to my mind, is
> the market that CMP should have been aiming for initially (perhaps it did,
> but I don't ever recall seeing any advertising for it).  Compilations of old
> games would be, I'm sure, quite popular.

Well, that would certainly be a good way to "jumpstart" public opinion and get
the market ready for new games.

At least, I think it would.  I suppose it could also backfire, by flooding the
market with older games, and tying up enough customers (still trying to figure
out how to get the [strong language censored] Babel fish) that there aren't
enough people ready to purchase a new game...


