Strategy Guide

[Tamur]

Well, I was feeling out the reaction to distributing a guide with cash purchase involved. Not for totalwar nuts like ourselves, but a more general audience (thus a lot of rewriting involved).

I know there's hefty demand, because my little Diplomacy guide alone has been downloaded slightly over 2100 times in the three weeks it's existed, and I've only put the link here and on the .com boards.

[RedKnight]

For what it's worth - and to lend a little bit of kindness to the world - folks who write strat guides are behind the eight ball, as it were, compared to true grognards like folks who dive deeply into message boards. I wrote the guide for the original C&C (McBrady), and here's how it goes:

1) The game dev is constantly updating the game until the last minute, tweaking things. Of course... what else would you expect?

2) The book writer keeps getting beta versions. Differences from previous betas are not always explained.

3) The publisher absolutely but absolutely wants the book to hit the shelves the same time that the game does - and for good reason. That's when it sells the most, and it's when the public at large has the most questions. (Most sales X brand new to everybody.) This means the writing has to be finished well before the game hits the streets - which means as of a day after the final beta, you have to be finished.

4) The game devs almost never have time to explain their game in depth to even the official game guide authors. It's crunch time for them! My publishing editor (McBrady, the "official" C&C game guide) personally got cussed out by the dev manager because I assumed "I needed to know" (silly me!) and I called into WestWood and talked to the main developer for a good couple hours. Bad call on my part - the people closest to the project have their every minute charted by game managers at crunch time. Of course, sometimes the author is in close. But consider the plight of non-official writers, too.

5) Corollary of above points: The author keeps getting betas with only general changes outlined. "We tweaked cavalry" or something. He or she has to figure how that changes all the possible scenarios/levels/campaigns/whatever. And they have to figure out all the implications in three days or less - when the next beta shows up, also barely explained.

6) Game guide authors don't have the insight of 10,000 rabidly interested folks (such as is found on this board). They are typically doing it all by themself, or a very few folks close to them. (Exception: MMRPGs which have been in beta a considerable time.) So, compared to the collective wisdom that a place like this has after a month of play, one can call their insights "eclectic" at best. For very complex games like RTW with many interacting factors, it's much much harder to make definitive statements. Remember, the devs keep changing equations right up to the last minute, and don't explain them well.

7) One could publish a book with the collected wisdom of players - but it would hit the streets a minimum of 2 months after game release (since it takes time to get feedback and then publish), 4 months to get real wisdom, 6 months to have tons of wisdom. But the better it gets, the fewer that will buy it. They'll have moved on or found other sources (like this). Publishing has a ton of "up front" costs.

***

All in all, some game guides are really helpful (if the devs were able to share things not real obvious, like equations or precise stats), some are really not - and this is simply how reality is.

Perhaps in the future there will be a workable economic model for folks to pitch in and make "the best game guide". It's conceivable, Tamur, and indeed "anyone" can publish - witness the many "unauthorized" guides. It's the economic model that doesn't work well - yet. As an example, GameSpot used to charge for one to download its game guides (but since switched to subscriptions that only mean you don't get ads). The huge problem for the internet at large, is the ability to have "penny downloads" or interactions. If/when there's a way to charge 15 cents for stuff without folks having to sign anything or fill out any form, lots of things like this would become a lot more viable. (Huge sites get millions of hits a day; what if they could charge 1 cent per visit completely without hassle?)

When penny downloads become easier than breathing (it'll happen sooner or later), we could easily make such a site, with a dynamically updated game guide, as folks learn and share more. However, when that time comes, the big publishers will be many steps ahead of fan clubs like us, since they have the legal and financial teams there for the asking.

A few thoughts

[Tamur]

Wow... thanks RK, that was highly enlightening, in many ways. After reading your post and thinking it over a bit, I can see where -- even if there is an apparent demand -- doing such a thing for pay post-game-release would be a very difficult proposition.

I just saw that the wiki is up, and I'm hard at work collating therother's econ analysis posts, so life is good. We'll leave a legacy for future RTWers who hit the Org, and I'll be perfectly happy with that

Cheers!

[khelvan]

Yeah, Kdub got it up for us! I have little web publishing skill, so perhaps someone better at organizing pages might want to take a stab at a navigation bar that will better help us organize information going forward...