anyway.

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thread: 2012-06-11 : Ask a Frequent Question

On 2012-06-21, Vincent wrote:

Moreno: I see the opposite, in every case!

Story-games.com doesn't represent our market. Lord. It's just a web forum. A tiny minority of our market hangs out there, tinier every day.

The expansion you saw in 2004-2006 was because of individual games' individual successes, and individual games' individual successes now are driving an expansion that's dizzying by comparison.

The fights we have now are vicious and high-stakes, and they're just getting worse as our games reach higher and higher levels of success. They aren't as public. The people we're fighting with now can't afford to look like asses to their own audiences, and neither can we.

You do have more people to play with and more games to choose from, and games sell better and make more money, than ever before. In 2005 I owned a copy of every single indie rpg. If you were a fan of a game you could expect to have played it with someone who played it with the creator. Things are way, way too big for that now.

We haven't conquered the world, no. But we've accomplished what we set out to accomplish, we have our feet under us, and we can now take a look around and decide what we want to accomplish next.

I think the mistake is to look at us like there IS a unified market. Expansion past a certain point doesn't work that way. It used to be that Jason's audience overlapped almost perfectly with mine, but that was when they were both tiny. They still overlap a little, and they still grow together a little, but you can't expect them to still cohere when they're this big.

Ah. Back in 2004-2006, it was possible to look at how our audiences were growing and think that there was a fold that we were bringing people into. We weren't! It was always an illusion.

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