Rich Hutnik wrote on Sat, Oct 4, 2008 04:28 PM UTC:
I am not going to say a one man band, or small group, can work to promote
an abstract strategy game, and make it successful. If you look at
Othello, that is the case. A small group market and promote it, and have
had success with it. They did manage to put in place an organization
(World Othello Federation), to make sure that there would be annual world
championship in the game, and foster community. This is needed. Of
course, with Othello, they reworked Reversi with a better set of rules,
but it didn't really match anything else out there. In the area of
chess-like games, we do have chess, and numbers of variants of it. This
makes a chess variant much harder to sell than say Othello. In the case
of where the variant doesn't require people to buy new equipment, then
there is one less revenue stream to the people who would promote it.
I do agree the number of people who would promote is far less relevant
than whether a community will take to a game. This community is what
makes a game relevant. And I believe they are the ones who need to find
and adapt whatever form the game and its rules take, to make it viable.
On this community front, an objective of IAGO is to provide a community
for games that may no be able to sustain a community for their survival if
they went it alone. By also getting people who play multiple games to have
a place to play, the game has a better chance of making it. In this also
is coordinating the effort of abstract strategy games that do have
communities with them, and also help them grow. These communities provide
the place for variants and smaller games to be able to find players and
hang around long enough to grow up on their own.
