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Saturday, May 26, 2012

Random Thoughts #92

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself that Jean wants more blogs about the company.

1. Playtesting is no fun, a fact that I always knew but learned again when testing Marines. We were not having fun testing Marines; it was serious work. We have to make extensive records, keep track of die rolls (after you roll four 11s you don't get another 11 until you have one full set of 36 rolls), make notes to fix rules, answer questions that never came up, back up and do the turn over again after discovering a stupid tactic, discuss every tactic and every move with each other, try one attack three different ways, calculate odds, etc. No, playtesting is NOT fun which is why we have so @#$%&! much trouble getting anyone to actually do it. Lots of people sign up to do playtesting, but few of them actually turn in a single report (and most of those never do a second one).

2. I got an email from someone doing an "indie star trek game" who wanted to license the SFB game system. This baffles me. First, why would I license my game system to someone doing a product in direct competition? Second, if he doesn't have a Paramount contract, why am I going to get Paramount mad at me for facilitating someone ripping them off? I just don't "get" some of these emails. Anyway, after a couple of emails I sent his emails to Paramount and they explained to him why his plan was not a good idea.

3. Crump's Law of Marketing: Birds of a feather flock together, and all of your turkeys will come home to roost. (A company with a history of doing games of a certain subject -- fantasy, World War II, science fiction -- will tend to attract gamers of that genre. If you do a horrible game, everyone who ever considers buying a game from your company will remember that awful one you did and want to be assured that this is not another awful game.)

4. Cole's Law of Marketing: Three things sell a game: the title or subject, the cover art, and the last game that the customer bought from your company. (Establish a track record of doing great products and you're well on the way to selling more products.)

5. Burnside's Law: Everything we do is marketing, and marketing never stops. (Your website, newsletter, convention appearances, tournament support, and visits to other websites are all part of your marketing campaign.)

6. David Crump's Integrated Marketing Theory: Every product needs to help sell every other product. (First, make every product a great product. Second, include ads in products for other products. Third, include variants in one product that require use of rules or units found in other products.)

7. Leanna's Law of Component Purchasing: Try to use something that some vastly larger company is already making in huge quantities for some other use. That saves the tooling and start up costs and you can buy them cheap because the other company already made millions of them (example: the little red damage markers in Star Fleet Battle Force).

8. Richard Cole's Law: Buy things (if you can) from people who buy things from you. If nobody you do business with sells what you need, buy it in your home town. If you cannot do that, at least buy it in your home state. Don't buy foreign goods if Americans made an equal product. Not only is the shipping cost lower, but it keeps the money circulating closer to home.

9. Avoid employing horse holders after you got rid of the horses. (At the start of World War II, it was noted that artillery units that had fought in World War I still had the soldiers assigned to hold the horses standing 50 yards behind the guns even though the horses had been replaced by trucks.)

10. Cole's observation: Once a year, you need to have a rambling hour-long conversation with each vendor about nothing in particular because something will come up in conversation that neither of you would ever have thought to bring up on purpose.