ORIGINAL: Tesuji
ORIGINAL: aaatoysandmore
I dunno when I was 13 I wanted every Avalon Hill game made and they were like $3.64 and my mom said they were too expensive. [:'(]
If she'd only lived to see the price of games today. [:D]
Luckily though I got $3.00 to $5.00 mowing yards so bought as many as "I" could afford.
Bought the original "Guadacanal" from a friend for $3.00 man did I make mint off that game years later. [:D]
Ok, let me rephrase again. What I meant was it was just as difficult back then to *make a profit* selling complex games, and you sorta confirm that. [:)]
Think of all the great gaming companies that went under, even those who had cashcows: Parker (Risk), Milton Bradley (Axis and Allies), Microprose (Civilization), SSI,...
I'm not so sure it had so much to do with money as it had to do with "interest" and greed. Out of the thousands of people I became aquainted with and even schoolmates only 4 that I knew were interested in wargaming.
Sure money plays a part in that also, but, had there been more interest like say in a game of Monopoly or LIFE they wouldn't have disappeared so quickly. Avalon Hill was around a very long time as I recall. SSI not so much.
The thing is games are not like toilet paper. We don't "need" games as much as we need toilet paper. [:'(]
On the other hand we can look at distribution centers like Electronic Arts an Activision and even Sega. They have been around a long long time. Ever since the Intellivision as I recall. They have absorbed a lot of these gaming companies and ended up deciding who stays and who goes. Like Hasbro with Squad Leader they never capitalized on the game sadly. If you want to call the crap they made with the Squad Leader name a Squad Leader clone ot the game Avalon Hill made you'd be sorely mistaken.
The best of times before corporate greed set in was in the 80's and early 90' before Windows 95. Look how many years we got by on Windows 3.1. Why do we need a new OS now nearly every 3 years?
There was a time when developers just made the games for the love of making them and not the money. The "Ultima's", many of the older SSI titles, Sid Meier's early developments and some of the best rpg's you ever played. Once animation and 32bit graphics took hold though they forgot about making 'great' games and then just got into making games for the money and boy did the bugs and unfinished games start to pour out. Patching is a "common" word now. There were two games over the years from 1982 to 1993 that I remember getting patches for in the mail. Ultima II and Master of Magic 1.31. Thas a lot of years and games I never needed a patch.
