BUBBLE BOBBLE'S FATHER DIES

More bad news for the videogame industry. Another classic designer passed away. This time it's Fukio Mitsuji, aka MTJ, Bubble Bobble's father. RIP. More info here.

SELLING NICHE GAMES

I think one of the pending tasks for this industry is marketing. Or more precisely how to sell niche genre games which can be perfectly profitable but no one cares to market approppiately. Of course this is not something developers can do much about it. Seems to me it’s something distributors and managers need to learn with time.

Apparently publishers don’t want to spend any time on ‘minor’ titles. They want to go for the winning horse, big titles with big profits. Each country division of that publisher release the game on each country, sells a lot of copies and everyone is happy. Sounds quite convenient for them. And a little lazy too.

The market for strategy PC games is reduced these times, but also other succesful genres in the past such as graphic adventures. If you sell those titles on each country you probably won’t get big selling figures individually, but if you put together all the people interested in those genres all around the world it’s worth millions of copies.

That’s why I think digital distribution platforms, such as Steam, should help a lot to these non-profitable-considered genres, allowing to make big profits when selling a product world-wide, instead of locally.