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EVENT DECK: Kickstarter Litigation, Wil Wheaton, Treefrog & Discworld, and Swtizerland
STRATEGY AND TACTICS: Developing Games – Does the publisher know best?
FINAL SCORING: Convention season is in full swing, New Portal web-store, and an earth-shattering announcement from Stronghold?
Intro Music: Happy Rock – Bensound.com
Hi guys.
Great podcast.
I think one can argue the general statement of ‘publisher knows best’.
A situation from my mate’s experience which surprised me totally.
In this case the publisher, whose name will remain a secret, wanted to take on a very well playing game with a fitting theme and all mechanics working, but first they just wanted to turn it on its head.
For starters they wanted to change completely the theme, OK you do not always know what will sell best, and theme doesn’t really matter if game is good it will be good dressed in any flavour.
The worst in this case was that they wanted to change the core rules and more likely other details. Let me state it again the game was playetested for over a year by a number of people who always enjoyed it.
There were other changes too, though I do not know what they were as they wanted to discus them only after the signing of a contract.
It would be great to know how much did they play it, some people tend to judge the game at the very first sight rather than playing it a couple of times to see different aspects of it.
Finally, to argue with my own argument I do not know if they would not make the game even better in the result though from the designer’s perspective you actually wonder if they are buying your game or just paying you to make their own?
All the Best and please the two of you keep on talking 🙂
Konrad