How-To Publish Games, The Tasty Minstrel Way

It may be hard today, fifteen years later—when every brand seems to come in multiple varieties—to appreciate how much of a breakthrough this was. In those years, people in the food industry carried around in their heads the notion of a platonic dish—the version of a dish that looked and tasted absolutely right. At Ragú and Prego, they had been striving for the platonic spaghetti sauce, and the platonic spaghetti sauce was thin and blended because that's the way they thought it was done in Italy. Cooking, on the industrial level, was consumed with the search for human universals. Once you start looking for the sources of human variability, though, the old orthodoxy goes out the window. Howard Moskowitz stood up to the Platonists and said there are no universals.

You're fortunate to recognize this so early!

You might be interested in reading this fascinating article my Malcolm Gladwell: The Ketchup Conundrum, which underscores the same point with regard to food products.


So why doesn't this work with ketchup?

This is an interesting post, but I wonder if it's actually correct. For a company with unlimited resources, certainly diversifying and trying to reach different customer bases is a prudent way of growing the company's overall business. But for a game company with limited resources, and only enough capital to publish a couple of games at a time, do you do better to release games targeted primarily at your core customers, or to try to broaden your appeal by releasing games that will appeal to a variety of customers?

I think the variables are: what is your core customer's saturation point? How many games will he realistically buy, compared to how many you're trying to release?

I suppose the middle-ground answer, and the one I think TMG has tried to follow, is to release games that will provide access to a new audience BUT that will ALSO appeal to the core customers.

Interestingly, as usual, the "big" companies provide mixed data here. FFG GMT, Days of Wonder seem to have a more or less straight-down-the-middle approach, where their games are always pitched right at their core audience. Rio Grande is similar but has a broader customer base; Z Man has been much more eclectic. The best counter-example to the advice in the initial post might be Eagle, which tried to stray far beyond their core customer to capitalize on the Texas Hold 'Em poker craze, and it ultimately drove them out of business.